UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi I am using the sendmail command for sending mails.
I have a requirement where i call this sendmail command
with the mail text.However this mail should be delivered
to the recipients only 15 minutes later.Till that point of time
it should be in the queue.Is it possible.If so what should i
pass as parameter to the sendmail command.

hi
use -q time option
-q[time]
Process saved messages in the queue at given intervals. If time is omitted, process the queue once. time is given as a tagged number, with s being seconds, m being minutes, h being hours, d being days, and w being weeks. For example, -q1h30m or -q90m would both set the timeout to one hour thirty minutes.

This is what i do .
In a perl script i do the following

$ENV{PATH} = "/bin:/usr/bin";
open(MAIL, "| /usr/lib/sendmail -q1m")
or print "Cannot open send_mail";
print MAIL "To: $recipients\n";
print MAIL "From: $G_thirdparty_admin_email\n";
print MAIL "Subject: $subject \n\n";
print MAIL "$contents\n";
close MAIL;

I expect the mail to be sent after 1m but it does not seem to work

Try using -t as well...

From man page:

The -q option is for retries in sending the mail. It will try immediately to send the mail, and if it could not, it would try again at the interval you set in -q. If -q isn't set, then it tries only once, immediately.

If sendmail is running on the system, it might be that if you used -q in the command and it failed to go, that the normally running sendmail process (one started on boot) could grab the message later to attempt to send (Not positive on this point but my testing shows this to be true - I disabled DNS to insure the email could not go but then the normally running sendmail will try every 15 minutes to send again).

If you don't want to send the mail now, then putting in a sleep command or scheduling an at job in a minute from now might be what you would want to do. Looking in the mailx and sendmail programs, I found nothing to delay sending a message. Possible that some other mail client could do this (like pine)

Added note: This may be something to help you out but would be changing how you send all mail possibly. local versus remote mail