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How does one delete all the processes still running for a user that is deleted? We have been having some mail issues with an email account for bounce addresses, been receiving millions of emails, and there are loads of server processes. Here is what we have tried:

  • Stopping postfix/dovecot didn't stop each individual process
  • skill -u username did not work
  • deleting the user did not work, the processes are still running using the users old user id which no longer exists on the system
  • killall for the process name does not work (e.g. killall dovecot)

here is a small selection of all the processes I cant kill, there's loads of these. new ones keep starting so no good targeting the process ID itself.

31121 597       20   0  205m 128m    0 R 13.6  1.6  22:49.73 dovecot/pop3
32130 597       20   0  205m 128m    0 R 13.6  1.6  21:47.79 dovecot/pop3
 1695 597       20   0  205m 128m    0 R 13.3  1.6  21:01.10 dovecot/pop3
 2321 597       20   0  205m 129m 1376 R 13.3  1.6  20:33.63 dovecot/pop3
 8991 597       20   0 71248  64m    0 R 13.3  0.8  17:57.02 dovecot/imap
11484 597       20   0 71248  64m    0 R 13.3  0.8  17:14.93 dovecot/imap

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