Re: [Exim] Handling of frozen messages

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Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Patrick von der Hagen
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] Handling of frozen messages
On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, Patrick von der Hagen wrote:

> Most frozen messages are bounces. They couldn't be delivered to one of
> my users and are sent back to a SPAM-account which doesn't exist.
>
> I'd like them to be sent to postmaster when they freeze.


Clearly you don't have much mail traffic on your system! :-) If I did
that to our postmaster I would rapidly be lynched. I just set auto_thaw
and a relatively short ignore_errmsg_errors_after value. (I also have a
window on my screen that tells me if any of the 3 servers I oversee have
frozen messages on them, and if I feel keen, I fire up an eximon and
take a look, just in case there is a non-spam problem. But those are
very rare.)

> Not a
> notififcation "Hey, on Server XY there is a frozen message" but the
> complete mail. And I'd like it to be removed from the queue afterwards.


There is no facility for doing this. One of the problems with this kind
of thing is making sure there are no loops. What if the delivery to the
postmaster freezes? (You've _really_ screwed up your configuration. :-)

An other problem with doing this is that you would want to preserve the
original message's envelope recipients somehow, so that, if the freezing
were caused by an error in your configuration, you could re-instate the
message and have it delivered. (But you'd also want to know which
recipients had already received the message.) This all sounds a bit
dangerous and error prone to me.


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