Topic: Getting qmail to send messages "immediately"

[Jim Crookston]

We are running e-smith 4.0 in server-only dedicated connection mode.  Our goal is to use this box for file/print and e-mail.  I am able to send mail messages from a networked pc to a recepient outside our domain; however the messages are not being delivered to the receipient for several minutes (they are delivered immediately using our existing mail server).  I'm sure it's desired in many cases to queue messages up and run the queue every x minutes or so, but for this application I need messages to be delivered as quickly as possible.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out how to instruct the esmith (or qmail) to deliver messages immediately.  I've poked around in /var/qmail,  /etc and checked the qmail site, but haven't figured it out.

Any help would be appreciated.

Jim

[Charlie Brady]

Jim Crookston wrote:

> Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure
> out how to instruct the esmith (or qmail) to deliver messages
> immediately.

qmail does delivery messages ASAP. Check the message headers to see where they have spent their time - it's probably somewhere else. And check /var/log/qmail to see what qmail has been up to.

e-smith 4.1 will be out soon and it comes with some mail log analysis tools, which produces various reports including time spent in the queue, and reasons for deferral or non-delivery.

Regards

Charlie

[Jim Crookston]

Thanks for your reply.  So there is no parameter that tells qmail how often to "flush" the queue?

[Carl Enset]

From the Qmail FAQ (in /var/qmail/doc/FAQ)

7.2. How do I manually run the queue? I'd like qmail to try delivering all the remote messages right now.

Answer: Give the qmail-send process an ALRM.
--
    At the command prompt logged in as root, type:

    killall -ALRM qmail-send
--
You may want to run qmail-tcpok first, to guarantee that qmail-remote will try all addresses. Normally, if an address fails repeatedly, qmail-remote leaves it alone for an hour.

--
If you want to know the number of messages in the queue at the command prompt logged in as root, type:

/var/qmail/bin/qmail-qstat