# ActionMailer and Postfix Parallel Delivery **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [February 23, 2007, 11:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/actionmailer-and-postfix-parallel-delivery/86641 "2007-02-23T23:55:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![enchanter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ce7236/32.png) [@enchanter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/enchanter)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2007, 11:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/actionmailer-and-postfix-parallel-delivery/86641/1 "2007-02-23T23:55:18Z")
Excuse me if this has been answered before… I couldn’t find the solution anywhere. I’m really having a problem with Postfix I believe, but I expect the Rails community to be the friendliest source of information, especially since I suspect someone has dealt with this before. I have Postfix set up to deliver all mail to a specific domain to ActionMailer in my Rails app. This works beautifully, except for one hitch. From what I can tell, Postfix delivers mail sent to more than one address in parallel, meaning at the _exact_ same time with multiple threads. No matter what kind of checking I do in my ActionMailer “receive” method, I cannot catch duplicate incoming messages, thus weird things happen in my app. Basically, I need a way to disable multi-threaded/parallel mail delivery in Postfix, or a way to guarantee that ActionMailer will catch duplicate messages. Just in case this doesn’t make sense, let me explain further… ActionMailer receives all mail for [example.com](http://example.com) and does something with every message: 1. John D. sends a message to both removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid and removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid. 2. Postfix delivers one copy of the message to ActionMailer for _each_ recipient, thus the Rails app gets _two_ copies of the message _at the same time_, in two completely separate running processes. Any help with this would be _greatly_ appreciated. I’ve tried numerous things on the Rails side to no avail, and the Postfix docs are confusing for me. ---
**Author:** ![enchanter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ce7236/32.png) [@enchanter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/enchanter)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2007, 12:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/actionmailer-and-postfix-parallel-delivery/86641/2 "2007-02-24T00:15:19Z")
> catch duplicate messages. > > Any help with this would be _greatly_ appreciated. I’ve tried numerous > things on the Rails side to no avail, and the Postfix docs are > confusing for me. I’ve never piped mail into Rails before, but I’d suggest doing some sort of “message locking” on the Message-ID header. Odds are those would be the same in your above example. However, I’ve received emails from some folks that are identical, but have a different message id header. No idea what their issue was, but it happened. So, you should think about how to handle that cause it’s gonna happen at some point… good luck. ---
**Author:** ![enchanter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ce7236/32.png) [@enchanter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/enchanter)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2007, 7:26am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/actionmailer-and-postfix-parallel-delivery/86641/3 "2007-02-24T07:26:45Z")
> I’ve never piped mail into Rails before, but I’d suggest doing some sort > of “message locking” on the Message-ID header. Odds are those would be > the same in your above example. Fact is, I’ve done this sort of thing, and even as much as logging the subject + sender to filter that way. Still, duplicate messages make their way through simply because each copy is delivered at the _exact_ same time in separate processes. It doesn’t seem to matter how early on I do the “locking” – the duplicates still make their way through in a separate thread/process. I’m really hoping someone knows a way to disable Postfix parallel processing. Perhaps I’ll post my dilemma to the Postfix list. Thanks for your help. ---
**Author:** ![enchanter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ce7236/32.png) [@enchanter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/enchanter)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2007, 9:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/actionmailer-and-postfix-parallel-delivery/86641/4 "2007-02-24T21:37:22Z")
On Feb 23, 2007, at 10:25 PM, Tim M. wrote: > same time in separate processes. It doesn’t seem to matter how early > on I do the “locking” – the duplicates still make their way through > in a separate thread/process. > > I’m really hoping someone knows a way to disable Postfix parallel > processing. Perhaps I’ll post my dilemma to the Postfix list. Thanks > for your help. Tim- I’d like to make a suggestion to save you some hassle. Piping each email into a script/runner does not scale very well at all. Each email causes a full rails process to fork and load the whole framework. If you start to get even 10 emails a minute incoming into a script/runner pipe you are going to start killing your server. The better way to handle incoming mail in rails imho is to start _one_ rails script/runner that has acces to yoru apps env and then have it run in a loop and have it go out and retrieve mail over pop3 or imap. This way you can poll the pop3 server every 30 seconds and process the mail you get and then sleep, wake up and process more mail. This scales _way_ better then piping every mail to a new script/runner and it will use infinitely less resources. YMMV Cheers- – Ezra Z. – Lead Rails Evangelist – removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid – Engine Y., Serious Rails Hosting – (866) 518-YARD (9273) ---
**Author:** ![enchanter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/ce7236/32.png) [@enchanter](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/enchanter)\ **Post date:** [February 26, 2007, 3:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/actionmailer-and-postfix-parallel-delivery/86641/5 "2007-02-26T15:42:52Z")
Thanks for the advice. I will add that to my list of to-dos for my app, but in the meantime, I still would love a solution to this problem. Anybody?