On Fri, 30 Oct 1998 m.hampson@??? wrote:
> - a machine I look after has a huge backlog to hotmail.com
I see regular delays, but never anything "huge". But then there are no
undergraduates on this system.
> I noticed exim is closing down the connection after each mail message.
> Then if a single connect fails (which is seems to happen fairly
> often) we enter a retry cycle.
Hotmail appears to have just a single host with a single IP address.
(They may be doing fancy things on the end of that address, but that's
how it looks externally.) If a connect fails, Exim will apply its retry
rules. You could try putting in a special retry rule that didn't delay
as much.
Exim does close down the connection after each message, unless previous
messages have delayed and are in its hints database as waiting for that
host. You can see if there any messages on the list by running
exim_dumpdb /var/spool/exim wait-remote_smtp | grep hotmail
For example, I currently see
mail.hotmail.com 0zZGac-0005by-00 0zZGfT-0005xp-00 0zZGnL-0006T4-00
for the three messages I currently have waiting. You can see when Exim
will next try by running "exinext hotmail.com". I can't show you the
output of that, because my three messages have just vanished under my
feet...
Hmm. Two of them went down the same SMTP connection, but the third
didn't. However, earlier in the day there seem to have been a pile of
messages to hotmail that went down the same connection. I'll take a look
around on Monday to see if there is anything that isn't behaving as it
should.
> SMTP<< 250 Roger
> SMTP>> QUIT
> SMTP<< 221 m40.hotmail.com Out
>
> Do I have a configure problem or is exim disliking "250 Roger"
Nothing wrong with "250 Roger". Exim looks only at the [first digit of]
the response code.
P.S. You aren't running with "queue_only" are you? If a message gets
queued without being routed, Exim doesn't know which host(s) it is
waiting for. Messages can also get queued at times of heavy load, etc.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
--
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http://www.exim.org/ ***
