Re: [Exim] Retry Rules and Mailing Lists

At 9:15 +0000 11/20/2001, Philip Hazel wrote:
>On Mon, 19 Nov 2001, Ephraim Silverberg wrote:
>
>> We want to have the option of having messages sent to mailing lists only
>> be attempted once for each address on the list and not retried or kept in
>> the queue (the list maintainer would get the error message with the list
>> of failed addresses).
>>
>> The natural way to try and do this is by "Retry Rules"; however, the retry
>> rules are designed to be triggered by individual recipient addresses and not
>> the mailing-list-burst sender address. Is there any way of altering the
>> retry rule behaviour to do what I want?
>
>I'm afraid not.
>
>Is it really sensible? Just because somebody's host happens to be down
>for a few minutes (every host has to reboot sometime), or is unreachable
>(every network connection goes down from time to time, sometimes for
>only a few seconds), you throw away mailing list mail destined for that
>host? Seems rather harsh to me.

I have noted that many schools and school districts routinely shut down
their mail servers over weekends and short vacation periods. Persons
receiving email via those servers would have a hard time staying on
Ephriam's lists, assuming a reaction to bounced email. Or seeing the
entire message flow if bounces are ignored studiously enough. (But he did
say "option"...so "some of Ephriam's lists".)

>
>Keeping mailing list mail on the queue for a shorter than usual time, on
>the other hand, does seem a plausible thing to do. Unfortunately, Exim
>can't do that either. Retrying is based purely on destination, not on
>source.

A separate Exim instance serving the lists is the only way I can think of
to do this. And that *could* be made to take weekends into account (by
automated substitution of alternate configuration files). But it would
have trouble with the timing of events like "Spring break" (once known as
"Easter vacation")...at least over here, different districts have different
Spring break timing.

--John (we actually have an Exim handling our few remaining Majordomo
lists, and another handling our Mailman lists)