OK, but will it hurt to delete the ones older than a week? A month? A year?

Based on the path alone, these files seem to be related to offline mail held by some MUA or other. Possibly keeping track of which messages were copied from server to client. Have you considered removing some of the oldest files and check the effects on your MUA?

On 2024-09-02 05:59, Steve Litt via dovecot wrote:

I stopped Dovecot, backed up the tens of thousands of files in /var/spool/smtpd/offline/, then deleted them, then started Dovecot again. Everything runs fine, so I guess those files weren't important, at least not to Dovecot.

I also found the major problem consuming so much /var space was Void Linux' package cache files, so I deleted all of those more than 3 months old. Soon I'll make a daemon or a cron job that deletes old files in these two directories, and probably a lot more.

I'm not an expert on Dovecot, but I've run it for quite a number of years, and cannot remember having seen that directory on any of my installations.

So I guessed the easiest way to find out about it, is to Google for "/var/spool/smtpd" (including quotes). The results seem to indicate that the directory is related to OpenSMTPD. E.g.:

https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/opensmtpd/smtpd.conf.5.en.html

 FILES
 [...]
 /var/spool/smtpd/
     Spool directories for mail during processing.

So if you have OpenSMTPD installed, you probably deleted spool files from undeliverable email (or so; I'm unfamiliar with OpenSMTPD). Maybe you should check what is in those files (Postfix queue files are readable when using postcat, maybe OpenSMTPD spool files are also readable).

-- Rob

Cristiano Deana via dovecot said on Mon, 2 Sep 2024 17:23:07 +0200

Hi,

first, you should ask to opensmptd's ML, this is not a dovecot related issue.

I didn't know that. Thanks,

What opensmtpd version? what OS?

I didn't know I was using opensmtpd, but to answer your question, version opensmtpd-7.5.0p0_1 on Void Linux.

Take a look here: https://github.com/OpenSMTPD/OpenSMTPD/issues/1012

Thanks!

I thought /var/spool/smtpd belonged to Dovecot, and never knew about the smtpd package, which was pulled in by procmail.

Thanks everyone, and sorry for the misdirection.

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com