Mails were getting struck in the interworx todo queue and the client was bit angry as he was having important mails in the queue. So reinstalling qmail was not an option.

The messages was not getting preprossed.

[root@bunnytech]# /var/qmail/bin/qmail-qstat
messages in queue: 5
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 90

The /var/log/send/current log (which is a good place to see more detailed sending/receiving errors for messages and issues like a stuck queue) showed only this for pages:

[root@bunnytech ~]# tail /var/log/send/current
@400000005e4beb790d8b6e1c alert: cannot start: unable to open mutex
@400000005e4beb7a0f042f54 alert: cannot start: unable to open mutex

For some reason server was missing the /var/qmail/queue/lock/sendmutex file:
[root@bunnytech ~]# cd /var/qmail/queue/lock/
[root@bunnytech lock]# ls
trigger

I created sendmutex file and gave it the proper permissions:

[root@bunnytech lock]# touch sendmutex
[root@bunnytech lock]# chown qmails:qmail sendmutex
[root@bunnytech lock]# chmod 600 sendmutex

[root@bunnytech lock]# ls -la
total 8
drwxr-x— 2 qmailq qmail 4096 Feb 12 08:54 .
drwxr-x— 11 qmailq qmail 4096 Feb 12 00:44 ..
-rw——- 1 qmails qmail 0 Feb 12 08:54 sendmutex
prw–w–w- 1 qmails qmail 0 Feb 12 08:54 trigger

After that we could see that the mails started processing.

• interworx
• Linux
• qmail