Hi,

Why not change the hard limit compiled in to one that works for you and
recompile.

i.e. Instead of the 1 day limit drop it to 1 hour or thirty minutes or up
the number of messages in the one day period.

Craig

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Fulton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: 05 October 2002 10:01
To: vpopmail list
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [vchkpw] Major autorespond problems.


Hi all,

Some of you may recall my recent troubles/complaints with autorespond
(which is required for the QmailAdmin package), and how I went about trying
to solve it.  For what its worth, my efforts appear to have failed.  Let me
explain.

I have had a number of complaints from a very large corporate client
regarding delayed e-mails.  These complaints are getting steadily
worse.  Some can be attributed to issues not related to the function of the
mail server in question, but unfortunately most can.  To best explain what
is happening, I am going to demonstrate how this situation comes about,
step by step.

1.  High-powered corporate executive sends out many e-mails to many
employees each day.  This executive follows company policy and CC's herself
on every message she sends.  She also, like many in her company, makes use
of the vacation/autoresponder function within QmailAdmin daily.

2.  Executive sends 5 e-mails one morning.  She notices that she receives
only 3 of her CC'ed copies, and receives the others later (ranging from 1
to 5 days, usually during the weekend [clue!]).  She receives complaints
from others, who also use vacation/autoresponder [clue!].

3.  Diligent sysadmin checks logs .. delivering okay.  Sysadmin checks
queue .. hmm, missing messages in queue.  Sysadmin -HUP's qmail-send and
see's some messages delivered, sometimes, and sometimes none.  Sysadmin
checks logs, and see's messages from autorespond saying too many messages
received from user, delaying.

I hope you're still with me.

This is what I believe is happening:  The messages are being delivered, and
auto-responses are being sent until the hard-coded limit of 3 messages in
86400 minutes (1 day) from a single user are received.  Then autorespond
does not send an response to the sender, and for some reason, the original
message is NOT delivered and is re-queued for later.

That is not acceptable.

This problem occurred using an unmodified autorespond (2.03) and using my
modified version of that program (which was supposed to pass the proper
error codes to vdelivermail).  Has anyone else experienced this?

There are three ways I can approach solving this:

1.  Remove the vacation/autorespond option from my
customers.  Unfortunately this is not an option.

2.  Modify QmailAdmin to increase the autorespond limits it creates within
the users .qmail file.  I'm tempted to increase them 100 fold just to save
some hassle, but this doesn't solve the overall issue.

3.  Work to fix this, even if it means modifying autorespond again.  And
there is also the possibility that autoresponder isn't the entire problem,
but vdelivermail as well (which explains why I'm posting this on the
Vpopmail list).

So, without further ado, a little help?

-- Steve


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