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Date:      24 Mar 1998 17:42:09 -0500
From:      Chris Shenton <chris@absinthe.i3inc.com>
To:        "freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Running sendmail queue upon connection?
Message-ID:  <87yaxzzp6m.fsf@absinthe.i3inc.com>
In-Reply-To: Victor Meirans's message of Tue, 24 Mar 1998 19:44:05 %2B0200

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I support a site which is increasing the number of customers who want
to have their LAN connect up to the ISP and suck down mail accumulated
at the ISP and then feed to their users by their LAN mail
system. These folks don't have a nailed-up connection due to cost --
the connect maybe once an hour. They are not routing to their LAN or
anything fancy. 

So I have a fixed IP address assigned to them on the comm  server,
associate that with a name in the DNS, and MX the domain to their
connecting machine with lower-precedence MX to my ISP mail
server. This way mail sent to them queues up on the server until they
connect.

Problem is when they connect, I don't know how to get them to signal
sendmail to run the queue and flush mail to them. 

My current hack is to have root run a cron job every 5 minutes or so
which tells sendmail with option switches to flush the queue to the
customer's domain. Problems:

* cpu hog -- most of the time the customer won't be connected
* customer must stay connected at least 5 minutes (length between cron runs)
* doesn't scale to dozens of customers.

I thought there was a ESMTP command which a client would run to
trigger this behavior. Problems:

* what command is this? I can't find it in the O'Reilly book; or am I
  delusional and just imagining it?
* Most customers are probably gonna use NT Exchange; how do you
  configure it to play nice with real SMTP servers and issue this command?
* What prevents a random person from connecting and flushing someone
  else's queue to them, thus stealing their mail?

Any pointers appreciated. How do you guys do it? 

Thanks.

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