Bug 20960

Summary: Fix for "Mail queue: 1 request" in daily security message
Product: Base System Reporter: Doug Lee <dgl>
Component: confAssignee: Brian Somers <brian>
Status: Closed FIXED    
Severity: Affects Only Me    
Priority: Normal    
Version: 4.1-STABLE   
Hardware: Any   
OS: Any   

Description Doug Lee 2000-08-31 09:30:00 UTC 
The daily maintenance routines (run from `periodic daily' from
crontab) nearly always report one message in the mail queue.  This is
because /etc/crontab pipes the output of `periodic daily' into
`sendmail root' and thus creates a queue entry which exists while
`periodic daily' runs.

Fix: 

Two suggestions.  (1) add `-oQ/tmp' to the sendmail call in
/etc/crontab on the `periodic daily' line.  (2) Redirect the output of
`periodic daily' into a temporary file explicitly, then sendmail from
the file and delete it, all on the same crontab line.  Both solutions
cause the much more pleasing "Mail queue is empty" to show up in the
daily mailings.

I prefer the first approach just because it's shorter, but users of
mailers other than sendmail might have a different thought on that (do
Postfix and other alternatives support -oQ<dir>?).
How-To-Repeat: 
Just watch the reports. :-)
Comment 1 Sheldon Hearn freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2000-08-31 11:21:06 UTC 
Responsible Changed
From-To: freebsd-bugs->brian

Over to the maintainer of the periodic scripts. 

Brian, my gut feeling is that there's nothing wrong with 
showing a message in the queue if there is a message in  
the queue. :-) 

However, I understand the point.  If you agree in principle 
(your agreement being important since you're the maintainer) 
I'll do the work for you and submit patches.  Just let me 
know how you want to handle this.
Comment 2 Sheldon Hearn freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2000-09-01 08:37:04 UTC 
State Changed
From-To: open->closed

Nobody feels strongly enough to bother, at this point. 
Calling this a problem is a stretch.  Werner Heisenberg 
would have something to say, no doubt. ;-)