Re: [exim] S

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Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Dionte Wilson
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] S
On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Dionte Wilson wrote:

> Does Exim allow mail to be scheduled for delivery at some time in the
> future?


Not directly, no. Exim is designed on the principle that all mail should
be delivered as soon as possible. You are better off keeping "delayed"
mail somewhere else, and having a different program inject it when the
time comes. Exim is just a postman.

Having said that, you *could* write a router that, if there was some way
of recognizing this mail (by domain, size, whatever), did not try to
deliver it until some future time, assuming that it could somehow
compute the time. There are (have been?) sites that use this kind of
thing to send out large emails only at night, for instance. However, it
would not work well if the queue were of any size. Exim is designed on
the understanding that it moves mail, and therefore its queue remains
small. It suffers a performance hit if it has to spend lots of time
scanning a large queue.


-- 
Philip Hazel            University of Cambridge Computing Service
Get the Exim 4 book:    http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book