eckert@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Toerless Eckert) (02/12/91)
There seems to be a very basic problem with sendmail:
I am running quite a large mailing list with more than 100 recipients.
Delivery for most of the recipients is by SMTP, and most of those recipients
have addresses where sendmails delivers too directly by setting up a
smtp connection. As sendmail does not deliver in parallel, it can take
quite some time to get a message out to all recipients, especially as
usually 5-10% of the machines are either dead or unreachable.
Usual messages to that list take thus more than an hour to send to all
those recipients whose mta can be reached in the first try.
Now the problem: When the sending machine is booted during the time sendmail
delivers the message, it will afterwards start to deliver to all
recipients again. Obviously sendmail does not keep track of recipients
in a way that is proof to system crashes. I assume, that sendmail only
creates a new job file in mqueue after it has finished a full transfer
run on one message, and not between multiple recipients of a single
message.
I would like to know:
- Am i correct with my observation, and have others run into the same problem ?
- Is there a fix to this problem ?
- Why not ?
Please reply by mail.
Toerless.Eckert@informatik.uni-erlangen.de
/C=de/A=dbp/P=uni-erlangen/OU=informatik/S=Eckert/G=Toerless
Cleared by German Telecom Censorsvixie@decwrl.dec.com (Paul A Vixie) (02/13/91)
Sendmail can be taught to rewrite the qf* file after each delivery, thus the recipient-list gets shorter and shorter during processing of mail to long distribution lists. The last released version of KJS (gatekeeper.dec.com:~ftp/pub/DEC/wrl-sendmail-8sep90.tar.Z) has this fix in it. It is UCB 5.61 + IDA 1.2.8 + other goodies. Cheers, -- Paul Vixie DEC Western Research Lab <vixie@wrl.dec.com> Palo Alto, California ...!decwrl!vixie