Name
T line
Synopsis
To limit the amount of time a
message can remain in the queue before being bounced,
sendmail must know when that message was first
placed in the queue. That time of first placement is stored in the
T
line in the qf
file. For
example, the following number represents the date and time in seconds
since January 1, 1970:
T703531020
Each time sendmail
fails to deliver a message from the queue, it checks to see whether
too much time has passed. It adds the T
line value
to the value specified in the Timeout.queuereturn
option (Timeout). If that sum is greater than
the current time, the message is bounced instead of being left in the
queue.
Messages are occasionally left in the queue for longer than the normal timeout period. This might happen, for example, if a remote machine is down but you know that it will eventually be brought back up. There are two ways to lengthen the amount of time a message can remain in the queue.
The preferred way is to create a temporary separate queue directory
and move the necessary queued file to that temporary holding place.
When the remote site comes back up, you can later process the files
in that other queue by running sendmail with an
artificially long Timeout.queuereturn
value (Section 11.9).
A second way to extend the life of messages in the queue is to edit
the qf
file and change the value stored in the
T
line. Just add 86400 to that value for each day you want to extend. Care is required to avoid editing a file that is currently ...
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