Sendmail Queuing?
Anyone seen any odd queuing by Sendmail (or the ability to change how it
queues)?
Say the primary MX for a host is down and we attempt to send mail to a
domain that it handles mail for. For example:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
necinc.com. 19h32m42s IN MX 100 mail.wam.net.
necinc.com. 19h32m42s IN MX 200 mail2.wam.net.
necinc.com. 19h32m42s IN MX 10 mailgate.necinc.com.
Now, if i force sendmail to run a queue for this host:
sendmail -v -qRnecinc.com
I receive this:
Running /var/spool/mqueue/h7KKJwrA001233 (sequence 1 of 1)
<Mikew@necinc.com>... Connecting to mailgate.necinc.com. via esmtp...
<Mikew@necinc.com>... Deferred: Operation timed out with
mailgate.necinc.com.
It dumps that back message back into the queue. It'll keep that up
for 6-8 hours THEN attempt to deliver to the higher weighted MX hosts
which are up and accept. Shouldn't sendmail realize that the one host
is down on the initial delivery attempt and try the next highest? I
could see if we couldn't reach all three hosts, but if just one is
down, there is no reason sendmail should queue the message for 8 hours
before attempting another host.
-Jason
Reply to: