RE: Mail cleanup process on AS400

["Andy Nolen-Parkhouse" <aparkhouse@xxxxxxxxx>]

Peter,

As Howard mentioned in his post, you can certainly put these commands in
a CL program and run them when you wish.  You could do it as part of an
IPL, as part of your backup, or on its own schedule through the job
scheduler.  I'm not sure that this is a great idea though.

My own preference is to know when something has gone wrong, not to have
things just disappear if they break.  If I understand your thoughts, you
want to automatically reset your mail system and clear out any messages
which may be in the system at that time.  Even assuming that they are
all mangled in some way (which may not be true), don't you need to know
that some mail (either incoming or outgoing) did not make it to its
appropriate destination?

As an alternative to the *CLEAR option on STRMSG, you could use *RESET,
which would process existing messages again; that would be my
preference.  Depending on how you end the MSF, you could have some
perfectly valid messages in there.

I've run both SMTP and the MSF.  My own experiences indicate that SMTP
is much less likely to be a problem than the MSF.  I don't recall ever
needing to clear SMTP.

Regards,
Andy Nolen-Parkhouse


> On Behalf Of Peter Vidal
> Subject: Mail cleanup process on AS400
>
> Hi list:
>
> I have read that in order to clean up mangled mail in the IBM SMTP
> environment,
> I need to create a data area like this:
>
> CRTDTAARA DTAARA(QUSRSYS/QTMSCLEAN) TYPE(*CHAR) LEN(1) VALUE('C')
> AUT(*ALL)
>
> Then, I have to stop and restart the SMTP server using the ENDTCPSVR
and
> STRTCPSVR command. To clean up mangled mail in the MSF area you need
to
> stop MSF
> (ENDMSF command) then use the *CLEAR option on when starting it:
>
>    STRMSF OPTION(*CLEAR)
>
> Is it possible to do this automatically? If so, when is the best
> time/conditions
> to be able to run this?  Is it good to include these steps as part of
the
> IPL
> process?  Should we do it daily as part of the backup process?
>
> You opinion is highly appreciated.
> Peter Vidal