I work at a mid-size ISP, where we use procmail as our local delivery
agent. We often have situations where there are lots of procmail
processes running for one user waiting for a lock on the user's
mailfile. We're thinking about modifying procmail to return a
temporary failure in many of these cases, so that sendmail will just
requeue the message.
Our plan is to create a new special variable that would indicate if it
was safe to do this. It would start out set to "y", but be unset
whenever a delivery was made, or whenever a program (other than a few
exceptions like "date") was run. Then if it couldn't get the lock
after a short timeout, it would return a temporary failure.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Do you think it's a bad idea,
or are there other things that we should watch out for?
--
Aaron Schrab aarons(_at_)execpc(_dot_)com
http://www.execpc.com/~aarons/
ExecPC Internet Systems Administration mail info(_at_)execpc(_dot_)com for
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