Re: [Exim] Format of a delivery error message?

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Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Kaz Sasayama
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] Format of a delivery error message?
On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Kaz Sasayama wrote:

> For your information, Ecartis already has a somewhat broken test for
> failing addresses that looks for two space characters at the beginning
> of each line, and '@' and ':' in the middle. This test used to work but
> no longer works with recent versions.


I'm afraid I've never got round to formalizing the bounce messages. It
is probably something that should be done, but there always seems to have
been something more interesting/useful/urgent to do.

One of the problems about the reason is that sometimes the reason isn't
known. Or there may be several reasons. Consider a domain with two MX
records to two diffrerent hosts. One times out, the other says
"connection refused". They both go on doing this for 5 days; the message
then bounces. Which reason would you like?

Another message for the same (timed out) host arrives shortly
afterwards, before the next retry time. In the default configuration,
Exim bounces it without trying another delivery. The only reason is "all
hosts timed out after a long retry period and retry time not reached".


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