Re: Work folder and long start time

surgemail-listnetwinsite.com wrote:
> I just rebooted two of my surgemail servers and I
noticed neither of them had http access to the admin tool. I
looked under services and both machines were had a status of
"Starting" The surgemail.exe was using up about 1%
of the resources... but after about 30-40 minutes, the
service finished starting and (status became
"started"). At this point the servers started
acting normally. 
>
> I've seen this before with mail servers that have a
large email queue, so the first thing i did is look for
surgemail's spool folder (turns out the folder is apply
named "work"). In it I found 40,000 files
(.idx/.itm extensions) on one server, and 30,000 files on
another . 
>
> My questions are as follows:
>
> 1) If these are email items waiting to be delivered,
why is my queue in the admin panel only showing 1,500? After
letting the server run for 30 minutes, I do see that I have
thousands more messages "Out" then
"In".
>   
It may have lost count, or they may be partial files (idx or
itm but not 
both), it is a bit odd. 

    1) Upgrade to the latest build on our site, stop
surgemail and
         delete del.noidx
    then start surgemail
   
    After it's started it should then know about the files,
or they 
should have been deleted.

    2) The queue files don't entirely explain the slow
startup, If that 
persists then grab mail.log after a startup and send to us
to examine, 
the upgrade may well fix it.

> 2) Some of these files are over a day old, and my
server is set to expire messages after 6 hours.. how can
this happen?
>
>   
If it doesn't know the queue file exists then it won't
expire it.
> 3) Can I just delete these old emails? If so, is there
a proper way to delete them, or can I just search for
anything thats more than a day old and delete it. Was this
why it took so long to start the service?
>
>   
They should be removed by the process above, if they aren't
then it 
would be good to figure out why.
If on unix also check if they are owned by 'mail' or not,
maybe 
surgemail cannot delete them.

You could delete them manually  that won't do any real harm.
 as long as 
you only delete the old ones.

> 4) Will it attempt to send these emails if I leave them
there? 
>   
It might.

    ChrisP.