[CDBUG-talk] sendmail question

[Steve Moon]

This isn't really a BSD question as such, but ... well, here goes.

We've got a fax server that accepts emails w/attachements, converts
the attachments to TIFFs and faxes them off. Works great, unless too
much comes in at once. When multiple mails come in at once (e.g.:
batch job that ships out 500 order status reports to 500 different fax
numbers) the fax server will not be able to keep up, it's temporary
file logic is braindead, so one person might get 4 different reports,
theirs and 3 others, while the 3 others might not get anything at all,
or might get someone elses report. Not good.

The product is now 'no longer supported' and we have to upgrade to a
new product that may or may not have the same problem. The upgrade is
going to take a few months to happen.

As a band-aid approach, we set the batch job to put a 5-10 second
pause in-between jobs, which avoided the problem. That is until the
SMTP service on the fax server died for some reason. Then all of those
nicely timed emails queued up in sendmail, and hit the system more or
less all at once when it came back online.

Is there some way to set sendmail or some other MTA (I'm open to
suggestions) to throttle the number of messages it will send in a
given time? I'd RTFM if I knew which FM to R, but this is more of
knowing the magic word to search for.

Any help appreciated.
Thanks-
Steve-