Sendmail to Postfix

Message

ikke · Post by **ikke** » Mon May 09, 2005 1:10 pm

Hija,

This weekend we moved our mailserver from an old Sendmail install to a brand new Postfix-based setup.
While migrating, quite a lot of mails were left in Sendmail's spool directory (yes we know, migration took too long, but for some reason we had to do it then without too much preparation). Once we started postfix, local and remote delivery and acceptance worked fine, but the spooled mails weren't processed.
Now these emails should (of course) be processed too. Just cat'ting them and piping to sendmail is unfortunately not an option, because all emails are splitted into several files (every MIME part in one file).

So the question is: how can we get these spooled mails processed?

Thanks for your input,

Ikke

adaptr · Post by **adaptr** » Mon May 09, 2005 1:16 pm

The smartest solution is to keep the old sendmail going, but on a different port.
Then set the postfix daemon as its smarthost and just let it process the queue...
The queue formats are different, so transplanting sendmail's queue to postfix is pretty sure to fail.

ikke · Post by **ikke** » Mon May 09, 2005 2:10 pm

Although this is a nice solution, we are not able to do it this way. The involved is some old Debian stable based machine we want to get rid of ASAP (and get a nice up-to-date Gentoo system in place, like our other machines), and apt doesnt allow to have multiple MTA's installed.
Next to this, none of us admins is used to sendmail configuration.

Thanks,

Ikke

kashani · Post by **kashani** » Mon May 09, 2005 2:59 pm

Assuming your old machine still exists I'd bind sendmail to localhost only and let it try send the mails. That way you know it won't be taking in new mails. You can even put in on private space behind a NAT and let it run out its queue from there. You might need to prod sendmail a bit by using its postfix flush equivalent.

If you don't have that many emails you might want to eyeball them and see if they are just nonsense. When I've done mail server moves I usually end up deleting the last 500 or so mails in the queue because they are undeliverables, spam, etc. I'd head a few lines out of each email and see if anything looks like real email. If not, then dump it.

kashani

ikke · Post by **ikke** » Mon May 09, 2005 4:02 pm

kashani wrote:Assuming your old machine still exists I'd bind sendmail to localhost only

Its the same machine, running Postfix now.
And installing sendmail on the same machine is not possible, as mentioned before.

Thanks!

adaptr · Post by **adaptr** » Mon May 09, 2005 11:25 pm

It's hardly like you're leather-bound to apt, is it ?
Just install Postfix from source - you don't need any fancy options, just the plain MTA.
Compiling shouldn't take more than half an hour - say an hour including editing the configs.

bryon · Post by **bryon** » Tue May 10, 2005 12:42 am

I second the above post.

kashani · Post by **kashani** » Tue May 10, 2005 2:04 am

Or assuming you don't want to mess with sources on your nice new server, I'd snag a desktop do a quick install with sendmail and rsync the spool files over. Startup sendmail and you're all set.

kashani