SMTP not working-- connect to 127.0.0.1:10023: Connection refused

Question

A couple of days ago, after turning off and on spam filtering using Server Admin, mail stopped being received for all users on the OS X Server 10.4.8 machine. I have tried stopping and restarting the mail service, restarting the server, restoring lots of files in /etc/ to how they were last week, with no change. All new mail is refused, and there are hunderds of mails in the queue that can't be delivered.
- how can I get it working again?
- how can I recover the mail in the queue? Where is the queue stored?
The SMTP log has entries like:
Feb 11 21:13:47 Woomera-Xserve postfix/qmgr[130]: F3AB8D44CB8: to=<[email protected]>, orig_to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=177778, status=deferred (delivery temporarily suspended: transport is unavailable)
Feb 11 21:14:56 Woomera-Xserve postfix/smtpd[254]: warning: problem talking to server 127.0.0.1:10023: Connection refused
and amavisd.log has entries like the following, which I think mean it is not running:
Feb 11 20:47:56 Woomera-Xserve.local /usr/bin/amavisd[943]: SpamControl: initializing Mail::SpamAssassin
Feb 11 20:47:57 Woomera-Xserve.local /usr/bin/amavisd[943]: SpamControl: done
Feb 11 20:49:24 Woomera-Xserve.local /usr/bin/amavisd[943]: Net::Server: 2007/02/11-20:49:24 Server closing!
Any ideas would be very welcome! I have no command-line experience with mail, having done almost all previous admin using Server Admin.

Answer 1

Based on what you are saying, it looks like Amavis is failing for some reason. So the good news is that your server is still receiving mail. It's trying to pass that mail to Amavis for processing, but then it's finding Amavis shut down. So, it's sticking mail in the queue and waiting until you get Amavis back up and running. Don't worry about that mail queue. It's doing what it's supposed to -- storing the mail until you can get your system back up.
Let's first verify that Amavis is or is not running.
Make sure that your content filter is turned on. Verify that "Scan email for junk mail" and "Scan email for viruses" are checked in Server Admin --> Mail --> Settings --> Filters and then save those settings.
Then, do the following:
Quit Server Admin
Open Terminal and issue the following ...
sudo serveradmin stop mail
[give it half a minute to shut down]
sudo serveradmin start mail
[give it a half minute to start up]
Then issue ...
ps -U clamav
You should have several processes running under the "PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND" header (post the results here on the forum). If you do have processes running, everything is probably alright. If not, issue ...
postconf -n
and post the results here.