sendmail, 4th Edition

MinQueueAge

Skip queue file if too young V8.7 and later

When the queues are processed normally, sendmail will attempt to deliver all messages (except those that have a recipient address that resolves to a delivery agent with the F=% flag set, (F=% on page 761). No distinction is made between recently queued messages and messages that have been in the queue for a long time.

Some sites might prefer to process the queue often—say, once every five minutes. This ensures that all important mail will be delivered promptly but can exact a price in degraded performance. Every time the queue is processed, sendmail tries to deliver every mail message in the queue, but many sites have queued messages that should not be retried every five minutes. One way to handle this problem is to set the MinQueueAge option. If it is set to 1h (one hour), every queued message is forced to remain in the queue for a minimum of one hour, even if the queue is processed more frequently. The forms of this option are as follows:

O MinQueueAge=wait                         ← configuration file (V8.7 and later)
-OMinQueueAge=wait                         ← command line (V8.7 and later)
define(`confMIN_QUEUE_AGE''`wait')         ← mc configuration (V8.7 and later)

The argument wait is of type time. If wait is less than or equal to zero, or if it is missing, this feature is disabled. If the units in the time expression are omitted, the default is minutes. There is no default for the mc configuration method.

Note that the decision to process is not based on the time the message ...