nullmailer-send(8)

NAME
nullmailer-send - Send queued messages

SYNOPSIS
nullmailer-send

DESCRIPTION
This program is responsible for coordinating the transmission of messages that have been queued by nullmailer-queue. It uses a variety of protocol modules to deliver the messages from the queue to remote "smart" servers.

When the program starts, the queue is scanned to build a list of messages to send. The queue is rescanned when either the trigger is pulled, or after pausetime seconds have elapsed after the last failed delivery. When there are no messages in the queue, nullmailer does no rescanning until the trigger is pulled. Pulling the trigger consists of opening up the trigger named pipe and writing a single byte to it, which causes this program to be awakened (if it's not already processing the queue). This procedure is done by nullmailer-queue to ensure that messages are delivered immediately.

Delivery of messages consists of reading the list of remote servers and then trying to deliver the messages to these servers as follows. For each remote in the list, the named protocol handler is executed once for each message remaining in the queue. If the protocol handler succeeds, the message is removed from the queue and processing continues with the next message. If it fails, the remote is skipped and processing of the remaing messages continues with the next remote. When all the remotes have been tried, nullmailer-send sleeps for a number of seconds specified by pausetime before retrying sending the contents of the queue.

CONTROL FILES
All the control files are reread each time the queue is run.

pausetime
    The number of seconds to pause between successive queue runs when there are messages in the queue (defaults to 60).

remotes
    This file contains a list of remote servers to which to send each message. Each line of this file contains a remote host name or address and an optional protocol string, separated by white space. The protocol name defaults to smtp. Blank lines and lines starting with a pound are ignored.

FILES

/var/nullmailer/queue
    The message queue.

/var/nullmailer/trigger
    A trigger file to cause immediate delivery.

/usr/local/etc/nullmailer
    The configuration directory.

/usr/local/libexec/nullmailer
    The protocol program directory.

SEE ALSO
nullmailer-queue(8), nullmailer-inject(1), mailq(1)