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
