Sendmail offline queuing

[Paul Howarth]

Neil Marjoram wrote:
> Does anyone know if it is possible to control the way sendmail queues 
> messages whilst offline?
> 
> I have a user that uses sendmail on his laptop, I understand that when 
> the laptop rejoins the network messages are delivered in reverse order 
> as in a stack type of queue. This has caused some confusion with 
> recipients when email arrives in reverse order. The user has asked me to 
> check to see if it possible to force sendmail to deliver these messages 
> in the order that he wrote them.

Try adding:

define(`confQUEUE_SORT_ORDER', `Time')dnl

to the user's sendmail.mc. The default is `Priority' rather than `Time', which 
will deliver small items with less recipients first.

Note that the sendmail manual page says:

   Creation (submission) time ordering is almost always a bad
   idea, since it allows large, bulk mail to go out before
   smaller, personal mail, but may have applicability on some
   hosts with very fast connections.

Be sure to have the commands:

sendmail -q -Ac
sendmail -q

in the script run by the user when the network connection comes up, to force 
the mail queue to be flushed.

Paul.