[rt-users] Email delay on ticket creation

[Bill Cole]

Kenneth Marshall wrote, On 3/11/09 2:27 PM:
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 02:02:15PM -0400, Bill Cole wrote:
>> > Derek Cunningham wrote, On 3/10/09 10:54 AM:
>>> > > Hi
>>> > > If I have gone about posting my question the wrong way please let me know.
>>> > > Should I add my RT_SiteConfig.pm file in addition to these logs? The
>>> > > autoreply goes out right away, but I'm getting a lengthy delay on only the
>>> > > admincc messages, and only sometimes when a user submits a new request by
>>> > > email.  It doesn't seem to matter who the user is.  If anybody sees anything
>>> > > helpful in my log entries please tell me.  If I should be including info
>>> > > from another log, please tell me.  I would have suspected a postfix config
>>> > > problem, but I'm suspecting my RT config because this only happens during
>>> > > the condition that a user submits a new request via email.
>> > 
>> > It's not primarily RT, it's primarily Postfix.
>> > 
>>> > > I am using RT 3.8.1 on Mac OSX (10.4), postfix/sendmail to relay to our main
>>> > > email server with SMTP.  RT is working great except for these email delays.
[...]
>> You *MIGHT* be able to get better behavior by adjusting the mail parameters 
>> that RT is using. The defaults are reasonable for Real Sendmail and for the 
>> sendmail compatibility interface of Postfix as Postfix is commonly 
>> configured on many Linux and *BSD systems, but it is really not suited for 
>> the modified (and somewhat old) Postfix that Apple ships on MacOS X with a 
>> desktop-oriented configuration. You might find that using 'sendmail' instead 
>> of 'sendmailpipe' for $MailCommand and adjusting $SendmailArguments (no -t) 
>> makes the whole issue vanish.
>>
> We have been using RT since 3.2 with postfix versions 1.x and later
> and this sort of problem speaks to a misconfiguration of the postfix
> system, not a problem with the age of the release. The sendmail
> compatibility even in the earliest postfix releases has no problem
> with the way RT submits E-mail. I would recommend checking your
> postfix configurations. Good luck.

The age is a tangential issue, but when working with Postfix on MacOS X it 
is helpful to know that one is dealing with an Apple-modified 2.1.x rather 
than Dr. Venema's 2.5.x and that the default configuration on MacOS X is an 
afterthought for a personal desktop system that almost never uses it. One 
can really fix that Postfix by replacing it with a standard modern version, 
adapt it to more normal use by changing the config, or adjust things that 
use it (like RT) to go around its flaws. I may be wrong, but I think that by 
using 'sendmail' instead of 'sendmailpipe' in RT, the envelope splitting 
task is done upstream in the Mail::Mailer part of a MIME::Entity  object 
rather than being handed off to the sendmail binary called with a '-t' 
argument. That should prevent the circumstance where messages end up sitting 
in the queue waiting for the next external event to trigger pickup.