For eachrecipient, delivery is attempted. If delivery is successful, that recipient??™s
address is removed from the sendmail program??™s internal list of recipient addresses. If
delivery fails, that address is either left in the list or bounced, depending on the
nature of the error.
After all recipients have been either delivered, bounced, or left in the list, sendmail
reexamines that list. If there are no recipients left in it, the message is dequeued (all
the files in the queue directory that compose it are removed). If any recipients are
left, eachrecipient results in an M line that is assigned the last error message for that
recipient, and the qf file is rewritten with the list of the remaining recipients and a
dot. Finally, the qf file is closed, thus freeing its lock.
Under V8 sendmail, th eCheckpointInterval option (?§24.9.14 on page 983) causes
checkpointing of this process. When this option has a positive value, the qf file is
rewritten after that value??™s number of recipients have been processed. For example,
consider a mail message to five recipients. If the CheckpointInterval option is set to a
value of 2, the qf file is rewritten after the first two recipients have been processed,
then again after four, and again after they all have been processed. This keeps the qf
file reasonably up-to-date as protection against sendmail being improperly killed or the
machine crashing.
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