Linode.com Forum

[sam_the_man]

Hello,

Been looking for a forum to ask my SMTP related question on for some time and came across this place - great :D

Anyway... im hoping someone could shead some light on a question i have to do with SMTP headers.

I have written a program to write a message to an SMTP server directly in raw SMTP. Example:

Code: EHLO mail.mydomain.com
MAIL FROM:<me@me.com>
RCPT TO:<test@test.com>
DATA
Subject: Random subject
Message content... bla bla bla...
.

Now this works fine. Nows the scetchy part! I want to make sure that if there is a mail queue on server mail.mydomain.com, mine gets processed before any others.

I have seen the "Precedence: special-delivery" and "Priority: urgent" headers, however these don't seem to work - they get processed after the rest of the queue. The remote mail server runs E SMTP sendmail.

Firstly, anyone know why this doesn't work? Is it correct? Can the remote servers adminisrator have set the headers be ignored/disabled in some way?

Secondly, does anyone else know any other methods i can jump the mail queue? Other headers? Loopholes of some sort?

Thanks,

Sam.

[andrewjw]

Why do you want to jump the queue? What is your mail so special that others have to wait?

I have seem Precedence: bulk used on mailing lists, but I can't believe any smtp server would allow a mail to jump the queue.

Andrew

[NecroBones]

My understanding is that those header lines are ignored by design, simply because there would be nothing to stop everyone from setting all of their mail to high priority all the time to jump the queue, and once everyone is doing it, the usefulness will be destroyed.

If it's your own server and you want to prioritize your own mail, you can probably find a setting for this... though it's been ages since I've configured sendmail, so I couldn't tell you where to look. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to effectively jump ahead in the queue on other mail servers.