Raise Postfix Email Retention Policy

  2011-07-25      83 words, 1 minutes

• mailq
• postfix
• retention

When you host a secondary MX server and the primary SMTP is out of order for more than 5 days, you will start to loose e-mail from the MX backup. There is a (temporary) easy way to deal with this: raise the retention time of the Postfix mail queue.

Edit postfix/main.cf, add

maximal_queue_lifetime = 30d

and reload Postfix. You’re done!

Keep an eye on the mail queue while the primary MX is down. Just to be sure not to have the secondary explode…