Floods of Emails Coming In To /var/spool/mqueue

I have a server box running Fedora Core 2 which hasn't been updated since sendmail 8.12.11-4.6. It has two mailman lists running on it which are important to me. Also, over the last few years, I've set up 2-4 email accounts which are hosted by the server for the convenience of guests who have stayed with us for vacations and so on. I haven't paid much attention to either mailman or the email accounts over the years -- they didn't cause an overt problem until now. Today I finally started investigating why some of my posts to the mailing list were not coming back to me as expected, and discovered that my /var/spool/mqueue directory is monstrously bloated. Look at the '20668416' in the directory listing (although I'm not sure what that number means, except to indicate the directory has a lot of files in it):

drwx------ 2 root mail 20668416 Jan 6 15:58 mqueue

I deleted the folder and then recreated it with the same permissions. But I'm still getting floods of emails from somewhere. 279 in the past hour or so. They look like spam.

How can I put a stop to these emails -- do I need procmail recipes? Can I configure sendmail to drop anything not coming in for a valid user? Or is it best to upgrade to the latest version of Fedora and work on tightening up processing of incoming emails? Is there any way of stopping the tidal wave of spam? What is a sensible approach to fixing this?

Thanks

Bob Cochran
Greenbelt, Maryland, USA





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