[rt-users] Throttling incoming e-mail

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 07:07:18PM -0400, Kevin White wrote:
> So, I'm wondering if anyone else has this problem.  I see several
> solutions.  One would be to see if there's any way I can make sendmail
> actually WAIT for the rt-mailgate to finish.  If anyone out there knows
> how to do that, that would be nice (and might be nice to put in the Wiki
> too).  Barring that, I'm seeing a real queue mechanism, where sendmail
> just receives all the mail and saves it (possibly in a maildir, so I can
> process them one at a time easier) and I'll use that as a queue, and
> right a queue processor that submits those one at a time to rt-mailgate.
>  Has anyone written anything like that?  If not, well, I'll probably be
> announcing it at some point in the future.  :)

My approach would be to shim it:

Instead of piping directly to rt-mailgate, pipe to your own script,
which simply drops the message in a directory.  Then have a background
process running which lifts those messages out one at a time, and hands
them to mailgate directly.

The only problem would be scanning the queue in the appropriate fashion
so as to make sure it's roughly FIFO; the proper arguments to ls in
your unqueue script are probably the magic there.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	"NPR has a lot in common with Nascar... we both turn to the left."
		- Peter Sagal, on Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me!