mail malarky

OMV has been running unattended for some time without apparent issue, but today I logged in to check a few things, ran the expected updates and all seems good. However, the mail.log has been and still is going crazy trying to send an email to admin@myserver.home, which is bounced (that address doesn't work), but it then repeats the attempt 7 seconds later. And 7 seconds after that and so on. It is being sent From admin@omvserve.home which would be correct, but what the hell is it trying to send to my local email server?

OMV Notifications are configured to email admin@home and this works. In fact mergerfs' weekly report is correctly delivered to admin@home, so looks like OMV configuration is basically ok. However I have a problem with something trying to send an email To admin@myserver.home and I cannot find that address anywhere in the configuration, but it's From admin@omvserve.home which implies it emanates from OMV.

What in OMV tries to send an email every 7 seconds?

i've used postqueue -p to show all the messages in the queue, then postsuper -d all to clear the queue, then postqueue -p to hopefully see an empty queue, but they're all still there.

I rebooted the OMV server and again, something is trying to send an email every 7 seconds. WTF is going on?

Thanks but 'nut' wasn't something I remembered and on checking it is not installed.

If I could find a way to see what the email is that is being sent, it should give me an idea of what is trying to send it. In any case, what is possibly trying to send a message every 7 seconds. Nothing should be creating that much traffic.

Quote from votdev

The admin user is only used for web UI login and does not get any emails.

So I guess it is a software that has a UI and the user admin that is sending emails to you. You did never mention what the content of this emails is. It might help to identify the creator of those.

I have email notifications setup to go to admin@home (which works) but these emails were being sent to admin@macserve.home that I may have set up in OMV years ago, but switched to @home as @macserve.home did not work. So I'm wondering if this loop has been going on for years.

Unfortunately I was unable to actually look at any of the messages to help discover their origin.

Anyway, in my attempts to reconfigure postfix on the server, a small change to test something caused 517 emails to suddenly be delivered and the loop stopped. They were rejected mail error messages that have obviously been looping around for quite some time. Anyway the loop was broken and the network as as quiet as it should be.

Also, I have now been able to modify postfix to accept mails to user@macserve.home, so there should never be another loop.

Now I can get back to trying to figure out why my auto backup function is not working as it should and not sending me notification emails, which is what caused me to discover the loop.