Thanks for the quick response. I have turned on session logging in the mercurys and mercurye modules. I'm not sure how to identify a problematic message in the queue.

The server is operating normally now. I'll have to wait and see if the problem reccurs. No antivirus on the server, by the way. I haven't run a disk check but there are no disk errors in the event log.

We have recently upgraded to Mercury Mail 4.5.2 due to smtp attacks. The program had worked fine for several weeks. A couple of days ago we experienced a strange mail queue corruption. The first odd sign was that Mercury was looping and attempting to establish a connection to the local IP address of the server (comcast.net destination).  Next we noticed malformed addresses in smtpe.log of the form:

 E 20071127 173808 473fb7c8 550 5.5.0 <scletaris@comcast.netEES: F 071127173806> malformed address: EES: F

These addresses had come through fine in mercurys.log.

The server seemed to go into some kind of loop as there were thousands of such entries in the log (admittedly, it is a high volume server).

These problems persisted for a couple of days and then disappeared.

Could this be an exploit to attack of some kind? Is there a patch for this?

Thanks for any information.

You need to capture the message from session logging, from MercuryS to MercuryE, then get a hold of the actual message in the queue: and submit all for inspection - impossible to help otherwise.

It does look as though the job has somehow become corrupted. The problem is that without knowing more about the circumstances, it's a bit hard to offer any kind of sensible diagnosis.

I'm working on Mercury at the moment (preparing for a v4.6 release soon), and will take a look at the code to see if there's anything that stands out. In the meantime, I can only suggest that you check the usual suspects - make sure that there is no antivirus scanner or other application/utility that might interfere with Mercury's access to its files operating on the queue directory. It might also be worth running scandisk on the drive to make sure everything is kosher there.

Cheers!

-- David --