The sendmail problem

[hangyu]

In my unix system, we have the "sendmail" daemon to connect our Lotus mail server to send out the mail , now the mail server can process around 100 mails within 1 minutes , but we found that sometimes the mail is lost (it may be due to too many mails ) , so now we want to control the speed of send mail , we want to control the sendmail to process each mail in 5 second , that mean the system send each mail out and then wait 5 second , and then send another mail out again until all mails are send out , could suggest is it possible ? thx.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

the queue interval is set in the following line of /sbin/init.d/sendmail:


/usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q30m && echo "sendmail"


but You shouldn't modify here, as this script will be overwritten by patches.

rather, You could re-scan the mailqueue in a shorter interval.

the following document has a lot of information for You:
http://docs.hp.com/en/5991-0707/ch02s10.html

As far as I know, sendmail should re-read and spool out the queue very shortly after a new mail is enqueued, so You might want to do some debugging :(

[Florian Heigl (new acc) · Accepted solution]

More specific to queue settings / tuning:

http://docs.hp.com/en/5991-0707/ch03s02.html#ciheehcc

[Sameer_Nirmal]

How Sendmail is working on your system?
If it is default working mode , then I would like to suggest followings

Don't run Sendmail in deamon mode all the time . Make it run at a specifed interval and process the mail queue.

Make an entry in root crontab for it. I guess
5 sec is too low for it. Consider 1-5 mints.

Please note , sendmail when try to process the queue , it will do for all pending mails to be sent and not one mail at a time. So you can schedule the sendmail at a specific interval which will have sufficient mail queue without flooding it and thus avoid lost mails..

[Bejoy C Alias]

There is some options u can set in sendmail.cf to tune the queue runnning process . These are MaxQueueRunSize - which will set the maximum size of any given queue run to this number of
entries. Essentially, this will stop
reading each queue directory after this
number of entries are reached . MaxQueueChildren - Limits the maximum number
of concurrent queue runners active. MaxRunnersPerQueue - Only active when MaxQueueChildren
defined. Controls the maximum number
of queue runners (aka queue children)
active at the same time in a work
group. Set the value of MaxQueueRunSize to 100 or something , MaxQueueChildren to 3 , MaxRunnersPerQueue 3 and try restarting sendmail and check .