[Discuss] Lost email?

[derek at ihtfp.com (Derek Atkins)]

What is the usual retry cycle, and how long until they give up?  I was down for about 6 hours.  I guess I'll see tonight if stuff gets retried at 24h.

-derek

----- Reply message -----
From: "Dan Ritter" <dsr at tao.merseine.nu>
Date: Thu, Jun 16, 2011 9:20 am
Subject: [Discuss] Lost email?
To: "Derek Atkins" <derek at ihtfp.com>
Cc: "blu" <discuss at blu.org>


On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 09:10:40AM -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> I was working on upgrading a mail server last night. To stop email delivery I just turned off postfix's smtpd entry.  I think this was a mistake, I'm not seeing any email retires from 6-12pm.  Did I make a booboo? If so it only affected me and my wife, and I would definitely have learned from my mistake...
> 
> In trying to not lose email I think I lost email...
> 
> For future reference it looks like you can set postfix to just return a 4xx code on all mail with a transport map entry in main.cf.  but somehow I thought smtp would retry on connection refused. 
> 

In general, stopping an smtpd process is fine. If you have a
secondary MX, that's where mail will go. If you don't, all
reputable senders will retry, and if you are down longer than
their retry cycle, will send a message back to the originator.

-dsr-

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