[svlug] Fw: MICROSOFT ACQUIRES LINUX OPERATING SYSTEM

[George Bonser]

On Sat, 14 Nov 1998, Javilk wrote:

>     Based upon mailings of several hundred notices and newsletters from my
> machine, I do not believe that this is quite the way is sounds.  If it
> were, I would be unable to run mailing lists from my Linux machine.   Item
> on the queue are skipped when they don't respond quickly enough, and the
> residuals are eventually either transferred, or returned as undeliverable.

One thing sendmail WILL  do is adjust the priority of a message lower
after a failure. In other words, if a mail fails, it is made lower
priority. It still must time out before this is done. Also, if sendmail
processes another message to the same site in the same queue run, it will
still attempt to deliver and then adjust the priority of that message,
etc. If 20 messages are queued up to a dead site and your SMTP timeout is
5 min, that first queue run is going to take over 100 minutes. That means
that any message queued near the start of that run will not be processed
for (queue-run time) + (queue-interval-time). If the queue-run interval is
1 hour, it can be 160 minutes or nearly three hours before that message is
attempted to be delivered. That is when you get users complaning about
slow email and you look to discover your queue jammed with mail to a dead
site.

Any admin that has had to deal with large sites has had this problem and
probably had to develop scripts to deal with it. Exim eliminates the need
for this. It also gives you a GUI queue manager and several reporting
scripts.


George Bonser

The Linux "We're never going out of business" sale at an FTP site near you!


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