sendmail, 4th Edition

The Default Queue Group

Prior to V8.12 sendmail, there were no queue groups. Instead, every -q command and every queue option (such as QueueDirectory) applied to all the queue directories you had.^[183]

Beginning with V8.12, sendmail offers a way to define multiple queue directories and a way to group them by function or specialty. For compatibility with old versions, a special queue group named mqueue is the default queue group. It takes on all the properties of every -q command, and every queue option, just like before.

When you later declare particular queue groups (as we show in the next section), those additional groups take all their properties from the default group, unless you override a particular property with a specific equate. Those equates and the command-line arguments or options they override are shown in Table 11-2 on page 410.

For example, the following declares two different queue directories:

define(`QUEUE_DIR', `/var/spool/mqueue')
QUEUE_GROUP(`regularmail', `')
QUEUE_GROUP(`slowmail', `P=/var/spool/mqueue/slowqueue')

The first line declares the queue used by the default group (always known as mqueue). Any other queue groups that are declared (such as regularmail) will use that same directory unless the directory is overridden by the P= equate, as shown in the third line. That is, the default queue group’s queue directory and everything else that is set for the default queue group is inherited by the regularmail group. For the slowmail queue group, however, everything ...