On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Jason_Meers wrote:
> In my mind the logical way to achieve something like this would be to
> have some kind of option in a transport that dictated the hours in which
> the transport was allowed to deliver messages. You could then specify
> different transports for different messages based on the criteria
> matched in a router (which could be any of the huge range of options
> currently available in a router now).
The problem with this is that the messages clutter up your normal queue
and use resources continually checking and finding that the time is
wrong. Anything that leaves messages lying around on Exim's queue
degrades its performance.
A different way of doing this is to treat it like delivery to
intermittently connected hosts. Deliver the messages using BSMTP into
one or more files when it isn't an appropriate time. Then run a cron job
at 8 p.m. to feed them back to Exim.
Another way of doing this would be to deliver to a different instance of
Exim that uses a different spool directory, and has queue_only set. Use
cron to start its queue runners during the night. Or even don't run its
daemon during the day - submit the messages using -bs - and have cron
jobs to start/stop the daemon (which controls the queue runners).
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service
Get the Exim 4 book: http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book
