PMDF System Manager's Guide

The notices, nonurgentnotices, normalnotices, and urgentnotices keywords control the amount of time an undeliverable message is silently retained in a given channel queue. PMDF is capable of returing a series of warning messages to the originator and, if the message remains undeliverable, PMDF will eventually return the entire message.

Different return handling for messages of different priorities may be explicitly set using the nonurgentnotices, normalnotices, or urgentnotices keywords. Otherwise, the notices keyword values will be used for all messages.

The keyword is followed by a list of up to five monotonically increasing integer values. These values refer to the message ages at which warning messages are sent. The ages have units of days if the PMDF option RETURN_UNITS is 0 or not specified in the PMDF option file, or hours if the PMDF option RETURN_UNITS is 1. When an undeliverable message attains or exceeds the last listed age, it is returned (i.e., bounced). When it attains any of the other ages, a warning notice is sent. The default if no notices keyword is given is to use the notices setting for the local, l, channel. If no setting has been made for the local channel, then the defaults 3, 6, 9, 12 are used meaning that warning messages are sent when the message attains the ages 3, 6, and 9 days (or hours) and the message is returned after remaining in the channel queue for more than 12 days (or hours).

The syntax for the notices keyword uses no punctuation. For example, the default return policy would be expressed as follows:

notices 3 6 9 12

If you want to change the notification ages for all of your channels, then the simplest thing to do is to add a defaults channel block to the start of the channel block section of your PMDF configuration file or to add the notices setting to your local channel. For instance,

defaults notices 1 3 6 9 12 l defragment charset7 us-ascii charset8 dec-mcs example.com

The defaults channel would appear immediately after the first blank line in the PMDF configuration file, usually PMDF_TABLE:pmdf.cnf (OpenVMS) or /pmdf/table/pmdf.cnf (UNIX) or C:\pmdf\table\pmdf.cnf (NT). It is important that a blank line appear before and after the line "defaults notices...". See Section 2.3.5 for a full description of the defaults channel.

See Section 1.4.4 for more information on the *notices keywords and how they interact with return message processing.