Name
F=%
Synopsis
Ordinarily, outbound mail is dispatched as
soon as it is handed to sendmail. There are
times, however, when mail should not be sent until it is asked for.
Consider the typical ISP. Clients who connect over dial-up lines are
not necessarily connected when mail arrives for delivery to them. The
F=% delivery agent flag has been added to prevent
sendmail from trying to discover if there is a
connection.
The F=% delivery agent flag, when set, prevents
immediate delivery to destination hosts. Instead,
sendmail queues all messages. Each destination
host must then request delivery using the ETRN command (Section 11.8.2.6) after connecting. One way a client can give
the ETRN command is by using the etrn.pl script
supplied in the contrib subdirectory of the
source distribution.
The local administrator can also cause delivery to occur manually for
specific clients with with any of the -qI,
-qR, or -qS command-line
switches (Section 11.8.2.3). Note that a standard queue
run (as with -q) will not send messages that have
been deferred because of this F=% delivery agent
flag.
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