Rebuild Sendmail queue

Hi all,

does anyone know if its possible to rebuild a sendmail queue.

I have a mailstore backup of all emails but now I need to put them
back in the sendmail queue to transmit some that were accidently
bounced.

I have the df files but need to rebuild the qf files I believe,

thanks all,

jON

sadsjon wrote:
> I have the df files but need to rebuild the qf files I believe,

The qf files contain the headers and the envelope information.

You might retrieve the sender and recipients from the mail logs,
though.
For MIME-mails you get the boundary information from the df files. The
character set and encoding information of the first portion is lost,
too.

ska

sadsjon schrieb:
> I have a mailstore backup of all emails but now I need to put them
> back in the sendmail queue to transmit some that were accidently
> bounced.
>
> I have the df files but need to rebuild the qf files I believe,

Do you have (a) the actual mails (as the word "mailstore" would
suggest) or (b) the df files from Sendmail's mail queue directory?

If (a) then you can just feed them into Sendmail again individually
with, in the simplest case, the command

# sendmail -t < message-file

Note that the "-t" option will extract the recipient address(es)
from the To: and CC: headers of the mail itself. Whether this is
correct in your case is up to you to decide.

If (b) then you have actually lost information which you won't be
able to restore, namely the mail headers, so what you are asking
for cannot be done.

HTH
T.

--
Please excuse my bad English/German/French/Greek/Cantonese/Klingon/...

On 18 Aug, 09:30, Tilman Schmidt <ts-usenet0...@pxnet.com> wrote:
> sadsjon schrieb:
>
> > I have the df files but need to rebuild the qf files I believe,
>
> Do you have (a) the actual mails (as the word "mailstore" would
> suggest) or (b) the df files from Sendmail's mail queue directory?
>

Good point Tilman.

In fact, I am using mimedefang to copy the entire INPUTMSG to my
mailstore.

And according to the "How To" this is:

INPUTMSG A file containing the complete input e-mail message,
including headers.

As we were under pressure to deliver last week I found a way around
this by using FTP to copy (ensuring that I was using ASCII transfer
type) the messages to a Windows IIS server and dropping them all into
the mail queue.

They were all delivered perfectly.

But I have been searching for a way to do this from Linux for some
time.

And it looks like your answer will do the trick perfectly.

I'm off to test ...

many thanks all,

jON

I tried

sendmail -t < m7K7EPf6001137

but this does not seem to have done anything.

The log files ... not a log at all

Is there some way to debug what sendmail does or see a log of its
actions?

thanks all,

jON

sadsjon schrieb:
> I tried
>
> sendmail -t < m7K7EPf6001137
>
> but this does not seem to have done anything.
>
> The log files ... not a log at all

That is most unusual. I cannot reproduce this at all. Even if I
feed it an empty file I get at least the message

No recipient addresses found in header

back on the console, and a log file entry

Aug 21 17:00:49 posthamster sendmail[31165]: m7LF0jgn031165: from=ts, size=0, class=0, nrcpts=0, msgid=<200808211500.m7LF0jgn031165@posthamster.phn xsoft.com>,
relay=ts@localhost

in the server's syslog.

> Is there some way to debug what sendmail does or see a log of its
> actions?

You can start by adding the -v (verbose) option to the sendmail
command. If that isn't enough, there's the -d<category>.<level>
(debug) option, but that is very awkward to use because the
manpage refers you to Sendmail's source code for finding out
what to specify for <category> and <level>.

But as I said, there should be some logging even without that.
If you get nothing at all then I suspect your problem lies
elsewhere. Which version of Sendmail are you running? On which
OS? Are you looking at the right logfile? Do you perchance have
several executable files called "sendmail" on your machine and
are running the wrong one? What does "sendmail -d0.1 < /dev/null"
say?

HTH
T.

--
Please excuse my bad English/German/French/Greek/Cantonese/Klingon/...

It looks like it is a problem at my Exchange Server end.

I am testing with an email that I know arrived.

The mail gets delivered to my exchange server and reports that it is
delivered to the correct recipients.

But I suspect there is a unique message ID that comes from the sending
server and Exchange see a duplicate ID and drops the email.

It doesn't report this of course :-)

Sendmail is doing its bit and of course, in some ways, it is a benefit
that the mail only arrives once. Its an extra failsafe that the end
user only gets mails that they haven't had.

many thanks Tilman and all,

jON