What are techmail considerations I need to know?

Environment:

Techmail
Oracle B2C Service

Resolution:

Considerations for techmail: (Note the below does not apply to the techmail on demand feature What is Techmail On Demand?)

• Only one occurrence of techmail can be run for a given site. 
   
• Upon connecting to a mailbox, a status count is taken of the number of messages at that instant and only those messages will be processed. If new messages arrive while techmail is running, those messages will be processed with the next techmail run.
   
• Once techmail has processed a new message, that message is then deleted from the mailbox. 
   
• If a given run of techmail takes longer than the gap between runs, the gap between each run may increase to 2 (or more) times the scheduled gap between runs. 
  
  For example, if techmail is scheduled to run every fifteen minutes and the current techmail run is taking 20 minutes, the current run will finish, but the next run will not begin until the next scheduled run (in another 10 minutes).  As a result, techmail will have run only twice within 30 minutes instead of the expected 3 times. 
   
• Techmail is not a real-time email delivery system.   It is a scheduled batch delivery system and service level agreements (SLAs) should be based on incident creation and not on the sent time of an email. Performance should be based on when an incident is created, not when one thinks it should be created.   
  
  If real-time is needed, then submittal of incidents via the Ask a Question page on the end-user interface is the best way to go and is more secure.