William Yardley wrote:
I'm just wondering if anyone has a good suggestion for how to deal with
workstations, setup with a $relayhost for all outbound mail, which
occasionally get unplugged from the network or otherwise taken offline.
While this doesn't happen to our machines a lot, it does cause some
annoyance when a machine gets unplugged for a long time and a flood of
messages (and the resulting bounces) come through.
What bounces? Are you talking about a machine that's
unplugged longer than $maximal_queue_lifetime but less than
$bounce_queue_lifetime?
maybe a really long maximal_queue_lifetime would avoid that
problem.
I could just set $maximal_queue_lifetime and $bounce_queue_lifetime to
really short values, but I'd rather preserve the original mail.
Throwing mail away sooner doesn't sound like a good solution
to anything.
I guess another approach would be to have a cron job that changes
$defer_transports and reloads Postfix if the network is down (and
reverses it when the network comes back up).
Yes, or just do nothing and let postfix figure it out.
Anyone have a better / less kludgy approach to this problem? Am I just
thinking of it all wrong?
I may not understand what problem you're trying to solve.
Maybe describe your problem a little better rather than
proposed solutions.
Disabling DNS lookups doesn't change anything, does it?
No.
The best practice for "occasional" fairly brief (less than a
couple days) outages is just ignore them. Postfix should
handle things pretty well up to several thousand deferred
messages. If you're expecting tens of thousands of deferred
messages, then maybe a script to defer_transports or to put
everything on HOLD until the network is back up.
-- Noel Jones
