One of the qmail servers I manage today has started returning strange errors in Squirrel webmail and via POP3/IMAP connections with Thunderbird.
What was rather strange is if the email doesn’t contain a link to a webpage or and attachment, e.g. mail consists of just plain text the mail was sent properly, if not however it failed to sent with an error message of:
Requested action aborted: error in processing Server replied: 451 qq temporary problem (#4.3.0)
After looking up in the logs and some quick search in Google, I come across some online threads reporting that the whole issues are caused by malfunction of the qmail-scanner.pl (script checking mail for viruses).
After a close examination on what is happening I found out /usr/sbin/clamd was not running at all?!
Then I remembered a bit earlier I applied some updates on the server with apt-get update && apt-get upgrade , some of the packages which were updated were exactly clamav-daemon and clamav-freshclam .
Hence, the reason for the error:
451 qq temporary problem (#4.3.0)
was pretty obvious qmail-scanner.pl which is using the clamd daemon to check incoming and outgoing mail for viruses failed to respond, so any mail which contained any content which needed to go through clamd for a check and returned back to qmail-scanner.pl did not make it and therefore qmail returned the weird error message.
Apparently for some reason apparently the earlier update of clamav-daemon failed to properly restart, the init script /etc/init.d/clamav-daemon .
Following fix was very simple all I had to do is launch clamav-daemon again:
linux:~# /etc/inid.d/clamav-daemon restart
Afterwards the error is gone and all mails worked just fine 😉
