Your message gave me an idea:
but it's not original! :))
How about if I set the primary IMAIL server to try 1 time before sending mail through a remote gateway?
IMGate/postfix already has this feature:
1. set the postfix SMTP timeouts "aggressive" ie, short and impatient, so postfix gives up quickly on slow MX's. Since most msgs transit IMGate in under 10 seconds, then 5 - 10 seconds would be the SMTP timeout to start with.
2. then set up a second postfix box to which the primary postfix dumps the slowbies:
"fallback_relay Hosts to hand off mail to if a message destination is not found or if a destination is unreachable."
This keeps the deferred queue on the primary gateway much smaller, and therefore faster. The primary gateway sends the quickly sendable mail at high rates, and dumps the losers on the secondary gateway.
I actually set this up for ColdFusion/CoolFusion on-line travel agency who had a list of 450K addresses. I setup 2 primary outbound gateways and 1 fallback gateway for him. He never used the setup because CoolFusion was so screwed it couldn't get the mail out of the CF box, while making 17,000 SMTP connections/hour (5 per second) to the postfix box without sending a single mail. :))
I did help Howie make CoolFusion work better by watching from postfix how CoolFusion acted as an SMTP client.
As I've seen many times, when other systems encounter IMGate/postfix for the first time, they often end up learning a lot more about themselves, discover their inefficiencies and bugs, and generally stagger away to fix their software/routers/firewalls/etc, appreciatively.
Wouldn't that speed up delivery? There must be an SMTP connection timeout setting where the timeout could be lessened to say 10 seconds so that faster servers would receive the messages and the remote gateway would send to the slower servers?
You're talking about a level of detailed SMTP parameter settings that Windows products usually don't offer and probably never will (We're Microsoft, trust us), but *nix products do and always have. If you go hunting bear, don't take a popgun. :))
Len
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