On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, Ian Jackson wrote:
> I think this is not a good idea. It means that if you leave a message
> frozen for longer than the retry timeout there's no way to thaw it and
> retry the delivery without risking losing the message.
That is true of any message of course, not just bounces. All this stuff
was added to Exim in the early days for use on systems where the
sysadmins wanted things to run without much human attention, and without
messages piling up for longer than the retry timeout, whatever happened.
(One common case: small messages get through, large ones don't. If you
don't have a rule like this, the large ones never get bounced.)
You can stop Exim doing this, of course, by adding a fake retry rule
that never matches any domain (stick it after the "*" rule) but which
has a very long timeout.
Many sysadmins on busy systems aren't interested at all in bounces that
fail, they just chuck them away. Others are prepared to use auto-thaw
for a few times, but want the messages to get slung after that.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
--
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