Found it.  Sendmail had been retrograded to 8.11.6-27 by a semiautomated
process.  Restoring the 8.12.10 sendmail binary got things going again.

Just thought someone somewhere might someday have a similar conundrum.

Sincerely,

Brand Walker
University of Missouri - Columbia


-----Original Message-----
From: Walker, Brand 
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 3:25 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Spool directory full of .mail files


This morning, one of my lsv child processes had died.  Job files weren't
processing.  I restarted LISTSERV (1.8e, running under RedHat linux),
and mail started processing.  All my .job files became .mail files, and
some of them left.  Some of the incoming jobs process just fine.
However, a great many .mail files seem to be stuck somehow.  My spool
directory is filling up.  
 
The system load hasn't increased.  In fact, it's fairly low.  I've tried
restarting LISTSERV, sendmail, the server.  Repeatedly.  No results
there.  Every restart produces a listserv.log message, stating that the
mail files are requeued for delivery, but they never actually queue up
and deliver.  They don't even seem to try.
 
Based on the Site Manager manual entry for SMTP_FORWARD_n, I've tried
both increasing and decreasing the number of SMTP_FORWARD_1 entries for
localhost.  Originally, I had it set for "3*localhost", which worked
just fine.  Increasing to 5 did not help, nor does decreasing to 1 make
it worse.  
 
It's as though the relationship between LISTSERV and sendmail gives the
.mail file one chance to leave, and if it does not, it never comes back
and checks again.
 
I've reviewed the available commands, but no help there.  I've peered at
my go.sys and go.user files, without success.  I'm still researching the
problem, but I'm not getting anywhere on my own.
 
Has anyone had an issue like this before?
 
Sincerely,
 
Brand Walker
University of Missouri - Columbia