Channel Programs and Message Queuing

Message enqueuing and dequeuing are generally done by channel programs also referred to simply as channels. There are two types of channel programs, master channel that dequeue messages, and channels (sometimes referred to as slave channels) that enqueue messages. Each MTA channel has its own message queue, referred to as a channel queue. Channel programs may also perform intermediate roles by dequeuing messages from one message queue and re-enqueuing them to another while, typically, processing the message at the same time. For example, the message processing might be to convert the message body from one format to another.