Apologies if such a question has already been asked and answered, but I've
had a quick search of the archives and Google groups and didn't come up with
anything.
I'm currently looking at a system that we have in place that sends messages
to pagers. Currently we have a sendmail process which sends mail set to a
specific domain to an external program "mail.page" which works out the
user's pager number and sends the message to Vodafone. All mail not for this
specific domain are forward to our main mail server. If a particular pager
receives more than 100 pages in an hour, Vodafone block it and mail.page
returns an error (currently EX_UNAVAILABLE) and logs to the syslog the
actual error message received form Vodafone (usually the pager barred
message, but there are others). Sendmail will queue the failed message and
attempt to redeliver. As the queue must be processed one message at a time
(due to the paging system) these failed pages hold up all other pages at
some times. It's also difficult for us to tell what the error is from
sendmail's logs.
So two main questions arise...
1) Is it possible for exim to recognise a failed page (I think that we can
set up a temp_error to signify a failed page and modify our mail.page
program to return this error code for a barred pager) and then either freeze
the failed message and all further messages to that recipient OR place them
all on a separate queue. The frozen messages (or second queue) would then
either be automatically released after about a specified amount of time, or
could be manually released once the pager has been unbarred (by someone
manually speaking to Vodafone).
2) Is it possible to pass some info back from the mail.page program to exim,
so that the failed page details may be logged by exim?
The other potential feature which would be a nice option would be to only
allow internal users/hosts to send mail to the paging system. Mail from
external address should be rewritten and sent to our normal mail server. I'm
sure this is probably the easiest to solve! :-)
Hopefully my questions aren't too bizarre for exim to handle (I'm looking at
exim due to recommendations from it's use at my old Uni.) - if so would
people suggest that we stick to sendmail or use some other MTA?
Thanks in advance,
--
Jonathan Batchelor - Unix Engineering & Support
> Lehman Brothers, One Broadgate, London EC2M 7HA
> Tel: +44 (0)20 7601 0011
> E-mail: jbatchel@???
>
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