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Date:      Wed, 25 Oct 1995 10:30:40 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Guy Helmer <ghelmer@alpha.dsu.edu>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        Ollivier Robert <roberto@keltia.freenix.fr>, "Jonathan M. Bresler" <jmb@kryten.atinc.com>, gary@palmer.demon.co.uk, chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: moving some mail. 
Message-ID:  <Pine.OSF.3.91.951025101327.29569B-100000@alpha.dsu.edu>
In-Reply-To: <27644.814631999@time.cdrom.com>

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On Wed, 25 Oct 1995, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

> > Like Bill has said, it is the paradigm used Usenet. It works but it is much
> > slower than mail  (even with the timeouts).  The vast majority of sites are
> > three or four  hops away  from  the other.  Usenet  can make it more   then
> > twenty... 
> 
> I think what *really* needs to happen is for sendmail to get a lot
> smarter about this..  Sendmail knows who it can't reach, and if it
> kept timing statistics for some number of "frequent destinations" then
> it could even intuit who was slow and who was fast, reordering its
> work queue accordingly.
> 
> 					Jordan

Uh-oh - more code in sendmail! :-)

I've got a Perl script written by Paul Pomes (at UIUC or CICnet) that 
I believe solves this sort of problem nicely.

The script moves older messages from one queue directory to another, such
as from /var/spool/mqueue to /var/spool/mqueue2; one infrequently runs
"sendmail -oQ/var/spool/mqueue2 -q" from root's crontab for the second
level queue, and likewise even more levels can be setup for less frequent
intervals.  Keeping the main queue short seems to help sendmail out quite
a bit. 

I haven't had to implement this yet on DSU's mail hub (some days I have
been tempted!), but it wouldn't be hard to install.  I could forward the
script to anyone who would like it. 

Guy Helmer, Dakota State University Computing Services - ghelmer@alpha.dsu.edu




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