Re: [Exim] Retry

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Author: Kevin Reed
Date:  
To: Shane James
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] Retry
Shane James said:
> I'm acting as a secondary mail server for a friend of mine... In other
> words his secondary MX records are pointing to my mail server for support
> relaying.
>
> DNS myfriend.com
>
> MX 0 mail.myfriend.com
> MX 5 mail.MYSERVER.com


The first question is why are you acting as an MX for your friends mail
server?

There are a couple problems with this.

1) A lot of spammers will send mail to you instead of directly to the site
despite the fact he is not down.

2) Unless you have access to his userlist, you can't deny at SMTP time
invalid mail accounts. This means that when he does (assuming he does),
it will cause a bounce on your system. You should make sure you have a
way to validate his users if you are an MX for his server.

Same goes for spam and virus checking.

3) Normally, there is no need to have a secondary MX record nowdays as
long as a site is not down for long periods of time. If a site can't get
to your site, they will retry later.

> A problem that I have encountered however is that is server is down quite
> often and now my mailserver rejects mail for his host relaying through me
> immediately as it reaches my server, when his server is down of course.
>
> It rejects with a:-
> retry time not reached for any host after a long failure period


Please refer to the use of exim_tidydb

I use a script to do this daily...

#!/usr/bin/ksh
SPOOL=/var/spool/exim
LOG=/var/spool/exim/log/tidydb.log
echo "`date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'` starting cron job exim to clean DBs" >>
$LOG
/usr/local/exim/bin/exim_tidydb $SPOOL retry >> $LOG
/usr/local/exim/bin/exim_tidydb $SPOOL wait-remote_smtp >> $LOG
echo "`date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'` finished cron job exim" >> $LOG


--
Kevin W. Reed - TNET Services, Inc.
Unoffical Exim MTA Info Forums - http://exim.got-there.com/forums