Scheduling deferred sending of emails

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Christopher Zimmermann (2023/07/29 12:55 +0200):
> I'm pretty sure this feature is only implemented in the MUA, not the MTA.
> Therefore if the MUA is offline at the time of the scheduled dispatch, the
> mail will be delayed longer.

Yeah that's why I had the idea of doing it in the MTA because it is more
likely to be running at the givne time, although that's not qguaranteed
either if it's on a laptop, say, the laptop may be turned off at that
time. But the givne time can be a minimal, meaning wait at least until
that time.

> In a unix environment you could accomplish such a task using a cronjob via
> at(1).

Yeah that's what I started to think. For instance, there could be a fake
sendmail that would be called in place of the real one, on deferred
message. That fake sendmail would store the messages somewhere and then
another process owuld check that somewhere regularly andi, if time has
arrived to send an email, it wouldsend it. And that would be a cron or
something. But that's where it felt to me that this logic is very
similar to the one implemented in a MTA and I saw is as kind of a design
smell saying thisis not the right way to go andrather try to have this
implemented in an existing MTA. I wish they were not so much beyond
me...

Seb.