Re: [Exim] Frozen messages - answers and questions

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Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Marilyn Davis
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] Frozen messages - answers and questions
On Tue, 9 May 2000, Marilyn Davis wrote:

> > That is why it says "neither action flags nor mail addresses given".
>
> But the message it is sending looks so exim-generated.


Absolutely. There are two instances of Exim running here:

Original message -> Exim(1) -> the script -> whatever -> Exim(2)

Exim(2) is called when a new message is being generated. Now, it appears
that Exim(2) is called without any options or arguments in the command.
So it barfs, and writes to stderr the following line:

> exim: neither action flags nor mail addresses given


and terminates with an error code. It seems that stderr is still the
same file that was set up by Exim(1) to catch any output from the
script. So Exim(1) sees this output and thinks "oho! - this script has
fallen over because it's generated output that wasn't expected. I'd
better mail that back to the sender". So it generates the bounce message
you see.

Does that help?

Philip

-- 
Philip Hazel            University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@???      Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.