🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello There!

Our ULTRIX 4.4 sendmail has been giving us a good deal of trouble 
lately.  If we reboot the system daily, all activity seems to work 
normally.  If we fail to do this however, we start seeing large numbers 
(maybe 20-50 -- a large number by our small system standards anyhow) of 
seemingly useless sendmail processes, most devoted, I believe, to 
receiving mail.  A few example entries, from ps ax:

544 ?  S      0:45 mail -r decstation-managers-relay@sws1.ctd.ornl.gov -d car
920 ?  IW     0:00 -AA01935 d.mx.aol.com: greeting wait (sendmail)
533 ?  IW     0:00 -AA01993 a.mx.aol.com: greeting wait (sendmail)
774 ?  IW     0:00 -AA05636 nic.ATK.COM: result wait (sendmail)
781 ?  S      0:21 mail -r decstation-managers-relay@sws1.ctd.ornl.gov -d car

A few of these are normal, to be sure...but the number of these processes 
that can hang around (perhaps 30-100) is really huge in comparison to the 
amount of e-mail we're sending in/out at any one time; we're just not 
that big.

Now these processes don't seem that terrible to have around, aside from 
being really annoying.  A while back, however, we let this problem 
persist for a while, and mail stopped working, both for send and receive, 
a problem I could escape only by deleting the old mail queue files and 
making a new place for them.  Do you think these processes could end up 
doing such things again?  Is there a way to make them go away?  Would 
that sendmail would just work....

Thanks!

-Chris