SMM:08-18
Sendmail Installation and Operation Guide
O QueueDirectory=/var/spool/omqueue
and the -q flag says to just run every job in the queue. You can also specify the moved queue
directory on the command line
/usr/sbin/sendmail -oQ/var/spool/omqueue -q
but this requires that you do not have queue groups in the configuration file, because those are
not subdirectories of the moved directory. See the section about ``Queue Group Declaration''
for details; you most likely need a different configuration file to correctly deal with this problem.
However, a proper configuration of queue groups should avoid filling up queue directories, so
you shouldn't run into this problem. If you have a tendency tow ard voyeurism, you can use the
-v
flag to watch what is going on.
When the queue is finally emptied, you can remove the directory:
rmdir /var/spool/omqueue
2.3.6. Quarantined Queue Items
It is possible to "quarantine" mail messages, otherwise known as envelopes. Envelopes
(queue files) are stored but not considered for delivery or display unless the "quarantine" state of
the envelope is undone or delivery or display of quarantined items is requested. Quarantined
messages are tagged by using a different name for the queue file, 'hf' instead of 'qf', and by
adding the quarantine reason to the queue file.
Delivery or display of quarantined items can be requested using the -qQ flag to sendmail
or mailq. Additionally, messages already in the queue can be quarantined or unquarantined
using the new -Q flag to sendmail. For example,
sendmail -Qreason -q[!][I|R|S][matchstring]
Quarantines the normal queue items matching the criteria specified by the -q[!][I|R|S][match-
string]
using the reason given on the -Q flag. Likewise,
sendmail -qQ -Q[reason] -q[!][I|R|S|Q][matchstring]
Change the quarantine reason for the quarantined items matching the criteria specified by the
-q[!][I|R|S|Q][matchstring]
using the reason given on the -Q flag. If there is no reason,
unquarantine the matching items and make them normal queue items. Note that the -qQ flag
tells sendmail to operate on quarantined items instead of normal items.
2.4. Disk Based Connection Information
Sendmail stores a large amount of information about each remote system it has connected to
in memory. It is possible to preserve some of this information on disk as well, by using the HostSta-
tusDirectory
option, so that it may be shared between several invocations of sendmail. This allows
mail to be queued immediately or skipped during a queue run if there has been a recent failure in
connecting to a remote machine.
Additionally enabling SingleThreadDelivery has the added effect of single-threading mail
delivery to a destination. This can be quite helpful if the remote machine is running an SMTP
server that is easily overloaded or cannot accept more than a single connection at a time, but can
cause some messages to be punted to a future queue run. It also applies to all hosts, so setting this
because you have one machine on site that runs some software that is easily overrun can cause mail
to other hosts to be slowed down. If this option is set, you probably want to set the MinQueueAge
option as well and run the queue fairly frequently; this way jobs that are skipped because another
sendmail is talking to the same host will be tried again quickly rather than being delayed for a long
time.
The disk based host information is stored in a subdirectory of the mqueue directory called