Re: smail problem: file table overflow

[John Labovitz <johnl@meer.net>]

> At 5 in the morning, my system sends out some 300 email messages.. I think
> smail ran out of file handles or something. 

i've had a related problem with smail.  i have a perl script that
generates 1400 or so messages, which it sends by piping them through
`/usr/lib/sendmail -t' (a link to smail).  the script was working
along fairly well, gradually getting the messages out, being naturally
buffered by my PPP connection.

however, once my PPP connection went down, smail suddenly couldn't
resolve any hostnames, and suddenly flooded the mail queue with all
the remaining messages, going so fast that it eventually ran out of
process table entries (i think!).

my solution was to change my invocation of smail to include the `-Q'
flag, which tells smail to simply queue the message and not deliver it
immediately.  this seemed to work fine -- smail happily queued the
messages and started delivering them at the next queue interval.

john

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