qmail change maximum retry time

Published February 14th, 2012

By default, qmail will try to deliver a mail for 7 days before giving up. Many users do not realise this and will assume the mail was received but unanswered. Here is how to change the maximum retry time to something a little shorter.

The retry time is stored in a file /var/qmail/control/queuelifetime and is a number of seconds.

# 86400 = 1 day
# 172800 = 2 days
# 259200 = 3 days
# 345600 = 4 days
# 432000 = 5 days
# 518400 = 6 days
# 604800 = 7 days
nano /var/qmail/control/queuelifetime
qmailctl restart