[Exim] Exim woes

First off: I love Exim because of the features. I need to enable mail
relaying for ONE emailaddress -- can't do that with sendmail, at least *I*
couldn't figure it out!

But: I hate it at times because it does apparently arbitrary things that
make me lose messages. I am using 3.13, though all my problems existed in
the last version too.

This is probably all due to a subtle, or not-so-subtle misconfiguration.
But for the life of me I can't find it... Hope someone can give me a pointer.

First and most troubling:

My mail client is Pine. If I have a "full" inbox -- that is, I have 1
complete screen of headers -- any new messages I grab with fetchmail (which
are passed off to Exim) are frozen. Why would incoming mail get frozen if I
have 25 or 30 messages already in my inbox?

As if that wasn't bad enough, forcing delivery with -qff arguments causes
the messages to be "delivered"... and lost. Gone. Not to be seen in any
spool or mbox file anywhere. Doh! A friend told me he got a bounce message
though, which is a good sign, sort of.

This isn't a disk space issue, that much I am sure of. Plenty of room
everywhere. No quotas in place, this is a very basic FreeBSD 3.2 system of
which I am the primary (and root) user.

Second problem:

Periodically a message will get frozen. A message to an address I use all
the time. Logs show a transient failure to contact a remote host. I have
auto-thaw set to 2 hours. Nothing happens. Forcing delivery with -qff
results in exim sitting there, not completing. Meanwhile other email to
that address is going through fine. What gives?

MANY thanks in advance for ANY help. I'll be happy to post my config file
if needed.

Cheers,
Matt Staroscik

____________________________________________________________
Matt Staroscik * matts@??? * 310.348.3014