PMDF System Manager's Guide
PMDF-REF-6.0

The processing and reprocessing channels are essentially the intersection of all other channel programs --- they perform only those operations that are shared among all other channels. In other words, such a channel is simply a channel queue whose contents are processed and requeued to other channels. Messages receive no special processing whatsoever.

The different between a reprocessing channel and a processing channel is that a reprocessing channel is normally "invisible" as a source or destination channel, as for instance in a CONVERSION, CHARSET-CONVERSION, or SEND_ACCESS mapping table, or in a source channel or destination channel specific rewrite rule. A processing channel, on the other hand, is visible like other PMDF channels.

It may appear that such a channel is effectively useless, but this turns out to be untrue. For example, the act of expanding a large mailing list may be very time-consuming. Timeouts may occur if this is done during the operation of a channel slave program with an open network connection. So PMDF provides the expandlimit channel keyword, which forces requeuing of the message to the reprocessing channel. Address expansion is then done as the reprocessing channel runs, free of any network timing constraints.

If a message destined to an address of the form user@domain is routed to the reprocessing channel, (e.g., due to rewrite rules or the expandlimit keyword) then the reprocessing channel will simply re-enqueue the message to the channel associated with the domain domain; if a message destined to an address of the form user@reprocessing-domain is routed to the reprocessing channel, (e.g., as may be the case for mailing lists using deferred expansion), then the reprocessing channel will re-enqueue the message to the local channel. In either case, the reprocessing channel performs any necessary expansion of the user part of the address.

When a PMDF channel has to generate a notification (bounce) message, such a notification message is initially enqueued to the processing channel.

A processing channel and a reprocessing channel are produced automatically by the PMDF configuration generator.^b

Note

^b If you are using an older configuration generated prior to PMDF V5.2, you may need to manually add a processing channel definition and rewrite rules to your configuration. If you are using an older configuration generated prior to PMDF V5.0, you may need to manually add a reprocessing channel definition and rewrite rules to your configuration. For its own uses, PMDF will act as if process and reprocess channels are defined even if they are not explicitly present in your configuration. But if you wish to make any site specific uses of such channels, explicitly addressing or rewriting to such channels, then you will need to have the channels explicitly present in your configuration.