procmail
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Re: Where does it go?

1997-11-10 21:35:26
craigb(_at_)efficient(_dot_)com (Craig Beckett) writes:
When procmail is the local mailing agent distributing e-mail to a user's $HOME
and the target machine is 'down', where does the e-mail go?

I assume that by "target machine" you mean the NFS server for the given
user's account, no?


I was given the impression that the mail would be collected on the 'mailhub' in
/usr/mail/BOGUS.xxx (Solaris system). It is not happenning and we have the
potential of losing mail. It just seems to be a trivial problem for an
excellent implementation, but the users don't like it ;-)

Procmail's attempt to read ~/.procmailrc will timeout, then when it
tries to write to $DEFAULT (which you say is in their home directory)
it'll time out (again) and return EX_CANTCREAT to sendmail.  Sendmail
will then presumably bounce the message.

Now, if sendmail is looking for .forward files in user home
directories, then procmail will never be called, as sendmail will try
to open the .forward file and consider it a transient error when it
times out, causing the message to be queued for a later delivery
attempt.

(Note: invoking procmail with the -t flag causes it to return
EX_TEMPFAIL instead of EX_CANTCREAT.  This would cause the message to
be requeued.  However, this is not generally recommended.)

Philip Guenther

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