Stalled queues and holding mail

[hickey@mail.kernelrom.com]

This past weekend some friends of mine needed to take their machine 
down for some major upgrades. We set my mail host up as one of the
MX hosts to catch their mail while the system was being upgraded.

I originally planned on sending their mail to a hold channel. The 
way that I understand it, the hold channel can be used to defer 
mail pretty much indefinately. I added the following lines to
my routes file:

	dbc-mifco.com		hold!
	ethical.com		hold!

Unfortunately, this did not work. It caused mail to be bounced back
with a message about something unusual and that it should be 
investigated. I did not have time to play with the setup, so I 
created some entries in the scheduler.conf file to set the expiration
time to 8 days. 

Now the system has been up for approximately 12 hours and the mail is
stuck on my system. I have tried to shutdown zmailer and restart it, 
but it has no effect on the messages that are stuck in the channel.

Here is the output of the 'mailq -sv' command:

0 entries in router queue: idle
9 messages in transport queue: working
smtp/dbc-mifco.com:
        19163-347:      (activation pending, thread inactive, expires in 7d22h,
tries=0)
        19157-341:      (activation pending, thread inactive, expires in 7d16h,
tries=0) 

How can I get the messages flushed out of the channel and go on their
merry way?

Also, how does the hold channel operate? What did I do wrong in setting
up the routes to the hold channel for each domain?

Thanks for you help.
--
Gerard Hickey			hickey@kernelrom.com
58 Lower Main St.		+1 207 676 8491
North Berwick, ME    03906