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queue or "pause" outgoing mail?

 
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Jenni Wolgast
Regular Advisor

queue or "pause" outgoing mail?

Our corporate email will be experiencing a planned 3 day outage. Is there any way I can have my HP-UX servers that send numerous email as part of batch jobs hold on to these messages while I know the email server will be unavailable? They still want the email to go to the appropriate users once the email server is back on line, is there anything I can do? Thanks in advance!
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Denver Osborn
Honored Contributor

Re: queue or "pause" outgoing mail?

You didn't mention, but I'll assume sendmail mta...

http://www.docs.hp.com/en/B2355-91064/ch01s04.html#ccidifij

Look at the section titled "How Sendmail Handles Permanent Failures"

Default timeout is 5 days, so you should be fine to let them queue up then check and flush the queue if needed after your corporate mail server is up. Be sure to check your config to confirm it's still default--Timeout.queuereturn=5d in sendmail config.

Hope this helps,
-denver
Jenni Wolgast
Regular Advisor

Re: queue or "pause" outgoing mail?

I am using sendmail, sorry for not including that info... My problem is that the server will technically be up and down throughout the "outage" and that we are actually moving from Groupwise to Exchange. So the Groupwise server will be up and accepting mail throughout the migration of all the mailboxes, however messages sent by HP-UX to someone after they have been migrated will be lost from my understanding. I don't just want to start pointing at Exchange either because the server will be up, but not all the users will be there until the end. If there was a way to "pause" mail on HP-UX so that it would accept requests to send email but not actually attempt to send the messages until we were all ready to go on Exchange that would be ideal...
Jenni Wolgast
Regular Advisor

Re: queue or "pause" outgoing mail?

I know I gave the first comment 9 points which looks like it marked this as having a solution or something but I am really looking for a better suggestion than just letting messages time out while the server is down. Does any one else have any ideas? TIA!
Steven E. Protter
Exalted Contributor

Re: queue or "pause" outgoing mail?

Shalom,

All you have to do to stop outbound mail delivery is to stop the sendmail daemon.

/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop

As a practical matter, if the relay server is not available, sendmail will queue up the mail for 5 days before it gives up on it.

You can modify sendmail.cf and change these defaults to deal with a longer planned outage.

In the end, unless the outage is more than 5 days, doing nothing will probably suffice.

SEP
Steven E Protter
Owner of ISN Corporation
http://isnamerica.com
http://hpuxconsulting.com
Sponsor: http://hpux.ws
Twitter: http://twitter.com/hpuxlinux
Founder http://newdatacloud.com
Jenni Wolgast
Regular Advisor

Re: queue or "pause" outgoing mail?

Thank you for the suggestion of stopping sendmail however I read on here before (I did try to do search before posting my question :) ) that doing that only stops incoming mail, not outgoing mail. I just tested real quick and verified that even after stoping sendmail, outgoing email still works fine. Any other ideas?
TTr
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: queue or "pause" outgoing mail?

Check out the DeliveryMode option and set it to "queue". the mail should be queued locally. You must stop sendmail as well or prevent it from processing the queued mail.
TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: queue or "pause" outgoing mail?

The queue processing directive for sendmail is in the "-q" option, default is "-q30m" in the startup script /sbin/init.d/sendmail. Verify that by removing the "-q30m" sendmail will not process the queue and not use a default value. Otherwise change the "-q30m" to "-q5d" for 5days.
Jenni Wolgast
Regular Advisor

Re: queue or "pause" outgoing mail?

It sounds like Delivery Mode might be what I am looking for, how do I change it? Is it in one of the sendmail config files??
TTr
Honored Contributor

Re: queue or "pause" outgoing mail?

It is in the /etc/mail/sendmail.cf file. The default setting is

O DeliveryMode=background

Change it to "queue" and restart sendmail. Also check the "-q30m" setting.