[Exim] SOLVED: Side question...error message meaning?

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Author: Scott Courtney
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: [Exim] SOLVED: Side question...error message meaning?
On Friday 07 November 2003 18:59, Scott Courtney wrote:
> Exactly what does this message:
>
> "retry time not reached for any host after a long failure period"
>
> mean? I'm getting it on just a small percentage of my inbound traffic, with
> at least some of those being rejected back to the sender.
>
> I didn't see this in the Exim manual anywhere.


In case anyone is curious, I found the problem. Clearing the database did not
fix the error; it recurred almost immediately when Exim was restarted.

The issue turned out to be a faulty routing rule. I had this:

# Router
inbound_route_to_mbox:
        driver = accept
        domains = +mbox_domains
        transport = remote_smtp_mbox
        ignore_target_hosts = 0.0.0.0 : 127.0.0.0/8
        no_more
# Transport
remote_smtp_mbox:
  driver = smtp
  gethostbyname = true
  hosts = $domain
  connection_max_messages = 5000


What I actually needed was this:

# Router
inbound_route_to_mbox:
        driver = dnslookup
        domains = +mbox_domains
        transport = remote_smtp_mbox
        ignore_target_hosts = 0.0.0.0 : 127.0.0.0/8
        no_more
# Transport
remote_smtp_mbox:
  driver = smtp
  connection_max_messages = 5000


For some reason, the first version (which I put into the config to try to
avoid an extra DNS lookup when I already knew the canonical hostname of
the next server in the flow) was occasionally -- but only intermittently --
failing to resolve.

In any case, the lower two rules are what I had before I got cute and tried
to optimize things; backing out that optimization seems to have fixed the
problem.

Thanks to those who replied about clearing the "db" directory, though -- it
turns out that I had another host doing this same error, and that hint *did*
fix that one (different config files without my failed "improvement").

Live and learn.

Scott

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