Linux – Mail Queue Fatal Error

centosemailemail-serverlinuxpostfix

I cannot send or receive any emails from my server. I have checked the mailq and it has over 1100 emails. I have tried to run the following to flush the queue:

/usr/sbin/sendmail -q

But I get this error:

postqueue: fatal: Cannot flush mail queue - mail system is down

The mailq is full of emails from 'root' to 'root'. I have provided the maillog and mailq entries below. Does anyone know what could have happened?

I am running CentOS 5.5.

EDIT

Here is a paste of the most recent maillog entries. Also here is the contents of the mailq.

Best Answer

Looking at the log files, I'd say this is your problem:

2011-05-15T16:36:01.835702-07:00 ip-XXX-XX-XX-XX lmtpunix[19520]: verify_user(user.root) failed: Mailbox does not exist

Obviously if the mailbox doesn't exist, mail cannot be delivered. You'll have to either create an empty mailbox (with correct permissions and in the right place) or you'll need to put a working alias into /etc/aliases for root, and then re-run sendmail -q.

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