Turbo Fredriksson wrote:
The inbox have absolutly NOTHING to do with the (qmail) queue.... The inbox (and the rest of the mailboxes) are just plain files. But the QUEUE files are encoded with the inode, which will change when/if you so much as TOUCHES the file (that is, everything but a READ!).
True, but for most mail admins on small to midsized systems what is in queue probably isn't that important. (I know its supposed to be guaranteed delivery, but...)
At any one time I will have several hundred messages in queue. About 10 of those are queued for inbound delivery and are typically flushed to a user's mail spool within 1 minute. The remainder are a few outbound messages from my users, most of which are going to bounce because the user mistyped the receiver's email address. The vast majority are spam bounces that will eventually double bounce. (I curse the spammer that sends messages to my users with _my_ "Delivered-To:" header already set, causing the damn "This message is looping" bounces. One of these days I will write a plugin for qpsmtpd that rejects mail with my delivered to line in the headers.)
So worst case I lose a couple dozen messages.. my users can handle that, but they would kill me if their saved messages were lost. (We use IMAP and encourage people to save mail on the server.)
Mark
