Philip wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Mar 1997, Michelle Dick wrote:
>
> > Basically, my smarthost is timing out on one bad address. And exim
> > can't deliver any in that batch.
> Fans of qmail's approach of sending each address in a separate copy of
> the message will now say "I told you so".
Why? qmail will have to face the same issue with its serialmail
solutions. This is also why the various spam packages recommended by
some qmail people are also non-solutions. They aren't robust to these
issues. In any case, I doubt qmail will address this issue in the
serialmail stuff because the qmail philosophy seems to be to assume
one lives in an ideal world and this problem is caused by bad
smarthost. I need real-world solutions, which is why I use exim.
> I have made a note to think about this problem, but I can't think of any
> elegant solution off the top of my head. You could try a queue run with
> a different configuration, one that sends one copy per address, at
> infrequent intervals, just to pick up messages that get stuck this way.
> You'd have to make use of the -C option to pick up a different
> configuration file, and run it as root so that it would trust the
> alternate configuration.
Hmm. That's sort of what I do. I have a second exim compiled that
looks at a different config file and that config file is set to not
use a smarthost. I ran it once and it cleared out the problem batch
pronto. This is also the version of exim that is aliased to
'sendmail', since there is no need to use my smarthost when sending
single or few-copies messages. Thus I and my local users bypass the
smarthost for our normal mail. Only bulk-mail (mailing list mail) and
queued mail goes through the smarthost.
BTW, I've been very impressed with mail lag and bandwidth savings I've
obtained using this combination of exim+smarthost and exim-normal. It
only takes a few hours to get out the list and even then I notice
little to no lag on my line. Prior to smarthost batching, I fully
filled the connection for 8 hours straight!
--
Michelle Dick artemis@??? East Palo Alto, CA
