sendmail message queue

[Michael Hoefle]

Hi!

I have a very annoying problem with sendmail:

My mail-relay server (sendmail 8.11) does not forward mails when I submit "sendmail -q".
It forwards mails automatically after 30 minutes. I started sendmail with arguments "-bd -q1m -om", so it should at least forward after 1 minute.
These problems occur only, if no connection to the corporate mail-server is established. After reconnetion I have to wait 30 minutes. Then everything is ok, the mail queue is flushed and new mails are forwarded immediately.
Has anyone an idea?

Thanks
Michael

[Christoph Rothe_3]

Hi,

I had this problem with sendmail too. It usually is caused because the mail is "deferred" when the destination host is unreachable.

You can configure sendmail in a way that it does only send mails, when doing "sendmail -q" with this option enabled, sendmail will flush the queue immediately.
It is important that you also turn off that sendmail immediately wants to canonify (DNS look up) mail adresses (if I remember the correct thing, you could remove the []-brakets in the canonification-Section of sendmail.cf in order to do this but I am not sure.

You could add some lines to your /etc/ppp/ip-up.local containing a sendmail -q.

Probably you could change the configuration file to immediate delivery in your ip-up and to explicit delivery in your ip-down-script.

More about this and how to achieve "explicit delivery":
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/mini/other-formats/pdf/Mail-Queue.pdf

(Page 6ff)

Hope that helps,

Christoph Rothe

[U.SivaKumar_2 · Accepted solution]

hi,

cd /etc/sysconfig/network.scripts/
vi sendmail
there -q parameter is assigned with default
1 hour (1h) delay. change it to 1m or 0m.
and restart the sendmail service.
hope your problem is solved now.

regards,
U.SivaKumar.

[Michael Hoefle]

The last one was the exact solution.
Thanks.