Fox et. al. -
It is safe to lower timeoutremote quite a lot. However, you should watch
your logs, because setting timeoutremote too low can dramatically increase
your chances of generating duplicate messages.
If timeoutremote triggers in the critical section of the SMTP transaction
(after your server starts sending the '.\r\n' and before you get a
response from the remote server) you get a log line with: "Connected to
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx but connection died. Possible duplicate!" This means just
what it says: qmail is going to deliver the message again, because it has
no way of knowing whether the mail was accepted or not.
My recommendation is that you lower timeoutremote in increments
(decrements?) and watch your logs for 'Possible duplicate!' errors.
Good luck,
David Lowe
On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Fox wrote:
> My timeoutremote was the default of 20 minutes waiting for a response
> from the mail server. This seems excessive to me. I would like to
> lower it to between 1 to 5 minutes so I don't have a bunch of
> qmail-remote processes loitering doing nothing.
>
> Is there any reason the default is so high at 20 minutes? Won't most
> mail servers respond within 15 seconds or less? Will setting it lower
> adversely impact my mail delivery capability?
>
> Thanks,
> Fox
>
