Re: [Exim] Retry rules/failing host

On Mon, 16 Dec 2002 21:01:12 +0000 (GMT) Philip wrote:

Thanks for the reply.

> On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, Tim Jackson wrote:
> > messages seem to be bouncing after only two days. For
> > example, a message received by the server for user@??? at
> > 05:48 on Saturday morning caused a permanent error message to be
> > generated at 05:48 this morning, with "No route to host: retry timeout
> > exceeded".
> Two days since what? Message arriving?

Yes, as above.

> That means nothing. Exim's retrying is *host* based, not message based.
> Your retry rule says"bounce stuff when the host has been down for 4
> days". I suspect that's what it is doing.

OK, understood. But messages (this isn't by any means a one-off) seem to
be bouncing consistently *exactly* (to the minute) two days after they are
received, which doesn't fit with this? (I believe what you are saying is
that this should only happen if the 4 day host-based cutoff occurs two
days after a particular message is received?) Since I'm using a
close-to-default config, delay_after_cutoff is presumably true (I haven't
set it false), and therefore they ought to be bounced immediately, which
isn't happening?

For example, I've just this minute sent a message to the failing address.
Since delay_after_cutoff is true, and the host has been down for more than
my max cutoff, the message should bounce immediately? But:

2002-12-16 22:40:37 18O3uf-0003Dv-00 <= me@???
H=myhost (myhost) [my.ip] P=esmtp S=729 id=blah
2002-12-16 22:40:37 18O3uf-0003Dv-00 == user@??? R=dnslookup
T=remote_smtp defer (-53): retry time not reached for any host

Having said that, looking at the output of exim_dumpdb, the most recent
entry (~4 days ago) was "connection refused" rather than "no route to
host", so I wonder if (contrary to what I understand to be the case), the
remote server has actually been intermittently up and down. But even if
that's the case, I still don't understand why lots of messages sent at
various times over a period of several days have been bouncing *exactly*
two days after receipt by the server in each case. It's impossible that in
every case, the 4 day cutoff has been reached *exactly* two days after
receipt of each message.

Also, in section 31.6 you mention calculation of post-cutoff retry times,
but the algorithm isn't mentioned. Is it rather complicated?


I should probably add that the situation in this case is simple:

failing.domain IN MX 5 unreachable.server.
failing.domain IN MX 10 my.exim.server.

domainlist relay_to_domains = <text file including failing.domain>

As is probably apparent, there's a low-level but constant stream of
messages inbound for this domain.


Thanks for the help! Even if Exim's acting 100% normally, I'd still like
to get to the bottom of this for my own understanding, since I'm
struggling to tie up what's happening with what the spec says should
happen.

Tim