Notices, nonurgentnotices, normalnotices, urgentnotices Channel Options

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Undeliverable message notification times (notices, nonurgentnotices, normalnotices, urgentnotices)

The notices, nonurgentnotices, normalnotices, and urgentnotices channel options control the amount of time an undeliverable message is silently retained in a given channel queue. The MTA is capable of returning a series of warning messages to the originator and, if the message remains undeliverable, the MTA will eventually return the entire message.

Different return handling for messages of different priorities may be explicitly set using the nonurgentnotices, normalnotices, or urgentnotices channel options. Setting values for the notices option is equivalent to setting those values for nonurgentnotices, normalnotices, and urgentnotices, so those values will be used for all messages. (In particular, if you wish to have, for example, an urgentnotices setting override a more general notices setting, then the urgentnotices option must appear after the notices option.)

This channel option's required argument is a list of up to five monotonically increasing positive integer values. These values refer to the message ages at which warning messages are sent. The ages have units of days if the MTA option return_units is 0 or not specified in the MTA option file, or hours if the MTA option return_units is 1. When an undeliverable message attains or exceeds the last listed age, it is returned (i.e., bounced). When it attains any of the other ages, a warning notice is sent. (Note that when return_units is 0, so that the ages are interpreted as days, the ages to be exceeded are interpreted as full, twenty-four hour days; for instance, in order for a notices value of 1 to apply to a message, the message must have been tried already for a full twenty-four hours. For instance, if the return job, as is usual, is configured to run at thirty minutes after midnight each day, and if the initial notices value is 1, then a message originally submitted on the first of a month will not get a notification message generated until thirty minutes after midnight on the third of the month; consider that on the second of the month, the message had not yet been being tried for a full twenty-four hours.)

The default if no notices channel option is given is to use the notices setting for the local, l, channel. If no setting has been made for the local channel, then the defaults 3, 6, 9, 12 are used meaning that warning messages are sent when the message attains the ages 3, 6, and 9 days (or hours) and the message is returned after remaining in the channel queue for more than 12 days (or hours).

If you wish to change the notification ages for all of your channels, then the simplest thing to do is to add a defaults channel block at the top of your cnofiguration (assuming you don't already have one) and set the appropriate notices options there.