[Exim] suspending delivery to given hosts?

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Author: Marc Haber
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: [Exim] suspending delivery to given hosts?
Hi!

One of our customers recently suffered from a major Exchange failure
and their IT people resorted to reinstalling the entire Exchange
system. That problem is still going on, and they don't expect to be up
before next monday.

So, incoming e-mail is queued on the firewall that runs exim and which
I am in charge of. E-Mail is delivered to exchange via a smartuser
director that uses the SMTP transport to route local e-mail that
hasn't picked up by any local directors to the Exchange box.

Since they are going to lose all their aliases and will probably take
a few hours to reinstall the aliases, I would like to suspend delivery
attempts to that host until they give the "all clear" for delivery. So
I want exim to not try any deliveries to that host now and instead
defer delivery on queue runs.

I have solved this by changing the "hosts" option on the
exchange_delivery transport to an unassigned local IP address, thus
making sure that exim cannot deliver e-mail to that address. Is there
a more elegant way to do it?

That unassigned local IP address (192.168.10.2) doesn't have any DNS
entries yet, and I have entered
192.168.10.2 * F,10d,24h
into the retry configuration. Is that enough to prevent bounces of
queued mails for the next ten days, or do I need to have DNS entries
for that IP address?

Any hints will be appreciated, thanks.

Greetings
Marc

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