By default, e-mail messages delivered by Message Router gateways and user agents to the PMDF-MR mailbox within Message Router wait until the next periodic PMDF processing job runs (by default once every four hours) and polls the mailbox to pick up the outbound mail. Outbound mail is therefore not immediately transferred. It is possible to enable immediate delivery of outbound Message Router e-mail using the PMDF Process Symbiont. If you are not already using PMDF Process Symbiont queues, then you will need to begin doing so in order to take advantage of this functionality; see Chapter 9 for details.

The PMDF Process Symbiont provides an important additional function for the PMDF-MR Message Router gateway by listening for message notification. By setting the PMDF-MR mailbox (typically named PMDF) in the MRMAN utility to /NOTIFY=PMDF_MR_NOTIFY, a message will be sent to the Process Symbiont's PMDF_MR_NOTIFY device by Message Router each time a message is enqueued for pickup. If the Process Symbiont is running it will receive the notification message and automatically enqueue a PMDF-MR pickup process. If the Process Symbiont is not running (i.e., there are no pmdf_process_smb execution queues or they are all stopped), the notification message will be ignored.

If you are currently using the /RUN attribute for PMDF-MR message pickup, you should remove it and convert to using /NOTIFY as soon as possible. Process Software does not support the use of /RUN because of severe limitations imposed by Message Router.