Enabling automatic dead mail processing

Dead mail occurs when the router can't deliver or transfer either a message to the intended recipient or a non-delivery report to the sender. You can configure the router to automatically retry delivery of dead mail and if unsuccessful delete it from mail.box after a specified number of retry attempts.

About this task

When you enable dead mail processing and the router detects a dead message in mail.box, the following steps occur:
  1. If the allowed number of delivery attempts has been reached, the router deletes the dead message and processing ends. If the administrator has set allowed delivery attempts to 0, the dead message is deleted without retrying delivery.
  2. The router attempts to deliver the original message to the recipient. If successful, processing ends.
    Note: Step 2 is skipped when the intended recipient is from an external domain outside of your company.
  3. The router attempts to deliver a non-delivery report to the sender. If successful, processing ends.
  4. The router waits the specified retry interval then begins with step 1 again.
Note: This feature might not be compatible with third party extensions that depend on holding dead mail until some specified processing occurs.

Complete the following steps to configure dead mail processing on Domino® mail servers.

Procedure

  1. Open the Domino® directory.
  2. Expand Configuration > Servers > Configurations.
  3. If a Configurations document associated with the mail server exists, click Edit Configuration. Otherwise, click Add Configuration to create one.
  4. Select Router/SMTP > Advanced > Controls.
  5. In the section Undeliverable Mail, in the field Automatically process dead mail, select Enabled.
  6. In the field Dead mail delivery attempts allowed, enter the number of times to allow the router to try to deliver dead mail before deleting it. (Default is 12, maximum is 1000.) The count is maintained across router and server restarts. If you enter 0, there is no delivery retry attempt and dead mail is deleted.
  7. In the field Time between dead mail delivery attempts, enter the number of minutes between delivery attempts. Default is 360 (6 hours), minimum is 15, and maximum is 1440 (24 hours).
  8. If there are mail servers in more than one internet domain within your company, in the field Internal internet domains, specify each internet domain to retry delivery to, separated by commas. Leave blank if there's only one internet domain at your company. For example: 
    renovations.com,renovations2.com

    A server retries resending an original message if the non-delivery report came from one of these internal domains. Non-delivery reports from domains not listed here are assumed to be from external domains; in this case the router attempts only to resend the non-delivery report to the sender and not the original message.