Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ateng!chip
From: chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Rubber mail
Message-ID: <253E5C9B.18132@ateng.com>
Date: 19 Oct 89 23:45:29 GMT
References: <72074@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <1138@virtech.UUCP> <322@bilver.UUCP> <310@sopwith.UUCP> <35@minya.UUCP> <9793@chinet.chi.il.us>
Distribution: usa
Organization: A T Engineering, Tampa, FL
Lines: 13

According to les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell):
>In article <35@minya.UUCP> jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
>>You might consider a mail script that calls one or more mailers,
>>and if they all fail, sends the mail to a nearby machine for routing.
>>Not a big enough overhead that anyone ever notices.
>
>How do you convince the mailers to just exit with an error status if
>they can't deliver instead of generating dead.letter or bouncing
>back to the sender?

If it's a Real Mailer, like Sendmail or Smail 3, it will have a command line
option to determine what action to take on failed mail.  In this case, you
would specify "do nothing".