Hi guys,

Ive got sendmail handling my mail fine on a dialup but i want to use it on my broadband connection and can't work out how to get the queue to flush. Cos on my dialup i just put an entry into the ip-up script.

Ive heard that sendmail automatically flushes the queue every hour is this true? if so ho can i make it do it say every 5 minutes?

Any help would be appreciated.

The flag for flushing the queue is -q (issue sendmail -q). However, I presume you are having sendmail run as a daemon, therefore, you would want to start it as sendmail -bd -q5m. If RH8.0 is configured as RH7.3, the startup flags are in /etc/sysconfig/sendmail and should look as follows:

DAEMON=yes
QUEUE=5h

The script in /etc/init.d (sendmail) will read this file for the options.

-db starts sendmail as a daemon, -q5m says flush every five minutes. Note that most mail is sent and forwarded immediately, flushing is needed only if for some reason the route to intended recipient (and intended mail exchangers) is down (most usually for me, my own internet connection), or if you are acting as a MX for another mail server. In those cases, mailed is spooled in /var/spool/mqueue until it either timesout (usually about 5 days, depending on setup) or can be sent on.