sendmail, 4th Edition

RecipientFactor

Penalize large recipient lists All versions

Not all messages need to be treated equally. When sendmail processes the messages in its queue, it sorts them by priority.^[413] The priority that is given to a message is calculated once, when it is first created, and adjusted (incremented or decremented) each time it is processed in the queue. You can think of priority as a cost, where mail with the lowest priority number (lowest cost) is handled first. The formula for the initial calculation is:

priority = nbytes - (class * z) + (recipients * y)

The items in this calculation are as follows:

priority

Priority of the message when it was first created.

nbytes

Number of bytes in the total message, including the header and body of the message.

class

Value given to a message by the Precedence: line in the header of the message. The string following the Precedence: is usually either first-class, special-delivery, junk, bulk, or list. That string is converted to a numeric value determined by the P command (Precedence on page 1148) in the sendmail.cf file.

z

Value given the ClassFactor option (ClassFactor on page 984) and a weighting factor to adjust the relative importance of the class.

recipients

Number of recipients to whom the message is addressed. This number is counted after all alias expansion.

y

Value given this RecipientFactor option and weighting factor to adjust the relative importance of the number of recipients.

The forms of the RecipientFactor option are as follows:

O RecipientFactor= ...