Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Mail Delivery Modes

As noted previously, Exim is able to deliver messages immediately or queue them for later processing. All incoming mail is stored in the input directory below /var/spool/exim. When queueing is not in operation, a delivery process is started for each message as soon as it arrives. Otherwise, it is left on the queue until a queue-runner process picks it up. Queueing can be made unconditional by setting queue_only in the configuration file, or it can be conditional on the 1-minute system load by a setting such as:

queue_only_load = 4

which causes messages to be queued if the system load exceeds 4.^[117]

If your host is not permanently connected to the Internet, you may want to turn on queueing for remote addresses, while allowing Exim to perform local deliveries immediately. You can do this by setting:

queue_remote_domains = *

in the configuration file.

If you turn on any form of queuing, you have to make sure the queues are checked regularly, probably every 10 or 15 minutes. Even without any explicit queueing options, the queues need to be checked for messages that have been deferred because of temporary delivery failures. If you run Exim in daemon mode, you must add the -q15m option on the command line to process the queue every 15 minutes. You can also invoke exim -q from cron at these intervals.

You can display the current mail queue by invoking Exim with the -bp option. Equivalently, you can make mailq a link to Exim, and invoke mailq:

$ mailq 2h 52K ...