> Does anyone know of a way to have postfix accept incomming messages, > process them, and queue them for delivery without actually delivering them > to the mail server? The reason I ask is, at time when it is necessary to
You have looked at the HOLD transport, and I can say I only needed that once. The default queue lifetime of Postfix is 5 days. That is long enough that unless you will be moving a server or expecting major issue. It will just hold the mail for that time. If it does go longer than 5 days, perhaps the bounces are better. My queue lifetime on Postfix is considerably shorter than the default. That is why I needed HOLD. I have a customer who we forward the mail to their server for. The firewall on their server stopped accepting port 25 for no known reason. No changes. It just stopped. I set up HOLD for them in case they would be down for days while troubleshooting. That let me keep my shorter queue lifetime, and cut down on bounces to bogus addresses waiting there, but still hold the mail for them longer than a day. They removed and reinstalled their firewall, it picked up the old settings and started working properly again. I changed their transport, re-queued the mail, and delivered it all in minutes. Down time of only a few hours for them, but it was worth having hold ready just in case. If I was upgrading our mail server(s) software, I would not bother with changing to HOLD or the queue lifetime. Most upgrades are quick enough for that even if there is a problem. If it was a hardware upgrade, I might push out the queue lifetime to 5 days rather than just 2 days. I have been thinking of cutting down to about 30 hours. I should be able to get all mail through in one day, so 30 hours gives me some leeway on top of that. And even at 30 hours I would not change things for a software upgrade. --Eric
