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we're building a webshop that will serve as a kiosk on a fair. The fair visitors stop by and order some things at the shop. We'll have some Tablets where the visitors can shop through our kiosk and order some stuff.

Hardware: we'll have a local server, so the website is locally available (like a local domain, or an IP). This server will also act as an access point. So the tablets connect via wifi to the server where the Shop is running.

This shop needs to send the order emails to the customers. It will work for sure if we have some internet connection.

But what happens if the internet connection is lost?

What would happen to the emails being sent without an internet connection? Is there some kind of email backlog that starts to send the emails when we regain the connection or will the send process just stop and the emails are gone?

We need to get sure that all order emails are sent properly at some time, even if the server loses the connection for some minutes or hours.

Some ideas:

  1. if we have an internet connection then send the mail (normal behavior).
  2. If we don't have an internet connection just let the mail on the send queue for later.
  3. If we reestablish the connection, send the emails waiting in the queue.

I need to know how systems handle those emails and which part of the system is responsible for the needed email queue (Windows? Linux? The webserver? The used software(WordPress)? ).

I appreciate your thoughts and answers.

Best regards Wellington

propz
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It completely depends on how your server is setup. You can certainly install a local MTA that will queue messages and send them when you are reconnected to the internet, and you can configure Wordpress and other software to use that local MTA.

Keep in mind that setting up this type of setup correctly, so that it actually works, and messages don't get flagged as SPAM may be pretty tricky. But it should be possible.

Zoredache
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  • Does that mean, that the software (wp) has to connect with localhost to send emails? Would postfix do that job? – propz Feb 09 '19 at 15:14
  • Wordpress can be configured in a number of ways to deliver email. It can use the local MTA, it can be configured to an externally hosted MTA, I think it defaults to local though. As for the local you can use whatever you like. I believe postfix would probably work, but I am not familiar with it. – Zoredache Feb 09 '19 at 19:36