nullmailer-send - Send queued messages

nullmailer-send [--daemon] [--syslog]

This program is responsible for coordinating the transmission of messages that have been queued by nullmailer-queue. It uses a variety of protocol modules to deliver the messages from the queue to remote "smart" servers.

When the program starts, the queue is scanned to build a list of messages to send. The queue is rescanned when either the trigger is pulled, or after pausetime seconds have elapsed after the last failed delivery. When there are no messages in the queue, nullmailer does no rescanning until the trigger is pulled. Pulling the trigger consists of opening up the trigger named pipe and writing a single byte to it, which causes this program to be awakened (if it's not already processing the queue). This procedure is done by nullmailer-queue to ensure that messages are delivered immediately.

Delivery of messages consists of reading the list of remote servers and then trying to deliver the messages to these servers as follows. For each remote in the list, the named protocol handler is executed once for each message remaining in the queue. If the protocol handler succeeds, the message is removed from the queue and processing continues with the next message. If it fails, the remote is skipped and processing of the remaing messages continues with the next remote. When all the remotes have been tried, nullmailer-send sleeps for a number of seconds specified by pausetime before retrying sending the contents of the queue.

-d, --daemon

Fork into the background, implies --syslog.

-s, --syslog

Use syslog for error and log messages. With --daemon, syslog will be used exclusively, without --daemon, syslog will be used additionally.

All the control files are reread each time the queue is run.

pausetime

The number of seconds to pause between successive queue runs when there are messages in the queue (defaults to 60). If this is set to 0, nullmailer-send will exit immediately after going through the queue once (one-shot mode).

remotes

This file contains a list of remote servers to which to send each message. Each line of this file contains a remote host name or address followed by an optional protocol string, separated by white space. The protocol name defaults to smtp, and may be followed by command-line arguments for that module. For example, to connect to port 2525 on your SMTP smart host, which also requires SMTP authentication, use:

smarthost.dom smtp --port=2525 --auth=user,pass

Blank lines and lines starting with a pound are ignored.

/var/spool/nullmailer/queue

The message queue.

/var/spool/nullmailer/trigger

A trigger file to cause immediate delivery.

/etc/nullmailer

The configuration directory.

/usr/lib/nullmailer

The protocol program directory.

nullmailer-queue(8), nullmailer-inject(1), mailq(1)