[rt-users] shut down without losing mail?

[Martin Schapendonk]

# Is there a clean way to stop RT (to upgrade versions for
# example...) without dropping any inbound email?  Does
# sendmail take some magic return value from a pipe delivery
# as a temporary failure and retry later?

No, not really.

If you are in the middle of an upgrade and RT does not run (the most likely
cause for that seems a misconfiguration to me), rt-mailgate generates an
error and sendmail bounces the email back to the sender, who will hopefully
try again in a few hours.

The cleanest solution I can think of is (untested): point the alias for RT
to a spool file (/var/spool/mail/rt or similar) during the upgrade. After
the upgrade, change the alias back to RT and pipe all mail in the spool file
into rt-mailgate, with the appropriate options.

Regards,

Martin