sendmail, 4th Edition

How the Queue Is Processed

Over time, messages can gather in the queue awaiting delivery. They remain there until sendmail performs a queue run to process the queue. The sendmail program can be told either to process the queue periodically (when run as a daemon) or to process the queue once, and then exit. Each time sendmail processes the queue, it also performs a series of operations that are intended to improve the efficiency with which it delivers messages.

First the queue directory is opened for reading. If that directory cannot be opened, sendmail syslog(3)s the following message at LOG_CRIT and exits:

cannot opendir(/var/queue): reason here

This error is usually the result of a user running sendmail in an unsafe manner, with a -C command-line argument, for example. It can also result from sendmail attempting to open an NFS-mounted queue directory, where root is mapped to nobody.

Next, the qf files are read to gather their priorities and times (the P and T lines). If a qf file cannot be opened, it is quietly ignored unless a -d41.2 debugging command-line switch is specified, in which case the following error message is printed:

orderq: cannot open qfdB928RR04181 (reason)

Prior to V8.7 sendmail, there was a hard limit on the number of messages that could be processed at any time. If more than QUEUESIZE (defined in conf.h, typically 1,000) messages were in the queue, only the first QUEUESIZE (1,000) of them would be processed! Ordinarily, this was not a problem. But it could quickly ...