Re: [Exim] Broken Pipe

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Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Raphaël Berghmans
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] Broken Pipe
On 21 Feb 2003, Raphaël Berghmans wrote:

> Some of the mail sent by Exim to a foreign mail server are dropped with
> the the following error : Broken Pipe. In fact the real reason is that
> the mail is too large. But this error is not considered by exim as a
> fatal error and it try later to resend the mail.


Broken Pipe is the error that Exim sees on some operating systems when
the TCP/IP connection to the host gets dropped.

> I would like that Exim consider the Boken Pipe error as a 55x error and
> then return the mail to the sender ? Is it possible ?


No, because then you would have a very unreliable mail server that would
bounce messages incorrectly. Consider the remote host dying in the
middle of a message, or the network crashing or your router crashing or
whatever. All of those appear to Exim as a dropped connection, which, as
I said, shows as "broken pipe" on some operating systems.

The foreign mail server is behaving incorrectly by breaking the
connection. It should be swallowing all of the message, and then
returning a 5xx error.

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