Queue has stuff in it

[DBA_Frog]

Yea, I know that ain't a very descriptive subject line, but hey ...

SO, I checked my queue, using the WebMin and in there was an email just sittin. It sat there over 24 hours until I copied it out and sent it with another account of mine.
The other account bounced it back saying the DNS server for the reciepient was dead. SO, why didn't I get that bounce info on my qmail install? and why did I just see it sittin' in the queue?, and why did I have to manually flush it? and how do I fix this.

Frog

P.S. I think I've fixed my AOL problem. They bounce my email because I use a dynamic IP service. Another board suggested that I route those emails thru my regular ISP { verizon }, I set the routing in WebMin to push AOL.COM domain mail thru verizon, but I want to check that I haven't set ALL my mail to got thru the providers server...how do I check this?

[_qmradmin]

The stuff was just "sitting" in the queue because qmail will not give up on a message after 24 hours. It will try for several days before it ever gives up on a message. Sometimes a destination DNS server or mail server will not be up at the time of intended delivery, so that's what the queue is for. If the mail servers can't be immediately reached, the message is queued and qmail will try to re-deliver the message at regular intervals.

A good example of this is the Qmailrocks.org mailing list. On any given day there are probably about 30 messages sitting in the QMR mailing list queue. However, this number will rise and drop on a daily basis because as some of the recipient mail servers come online, those messages get delivered.

Also, as I've said before, if you really want your qmail server to perform better in terms of how fast it clears its queue, try installed djbdns and setting up a local internal caching nameserver for qmail to use. The performace improvement will blow you away. I've provided djbdns installation instructions at http://www.djbdnsrocks.org

Thanks,
QMR Administrator