I have some bizarre delay message on our exim v4.1 server, the original
message does seem to be delayed for a valid reason such as a refused
connection or connection time-out but the retries seem to fail for a failed
look-up to a bizarre address, see below;
...
A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its
recipients after more than 24 hours on the queue on
mx03.scottish-southern.co.uk.
The message identifier is: 1B3tli-0003bb-00
The subject of the message is: Re: Fw: Tea
The date of the message is: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 09:23:34 +0000
The address to which the message has not yet been delivered is:
email@???
Delay reason: failed to lookup IP address for \b.1.35.134
...
As you can see delivery is trying to look-up \b.1.35.134 which is a) not a
valid ip address, b) it should be looking up domain name to return an IP
and c) .1.35.134 is the internal IP address of our mail servers for which
exim relay the mails to and from. This error seems to be the same for many
different messages and the logs are full of this error. There are of course
plenty of references to our internal mail server in the config but no /b so
i don't understand why its happening. I have also checked some of the
address involved and the server can resolve the domain correctly so it
can't be a host file or dns issue as far as i can see.
Just for FYI, all external mail is routed using an nslookup and then sent
using a standard SMTP transport, as follows;
...
# Perform an MX look-up for all outgoing mail and deliver via SMTP
lookuphost:
driver = dnslookup
domains = !+local_domains
transport = remote_smtp
...
...
# Customised smtp settings, specifying no more than 25 rcpts per mail
remote_smtp:
driver = smtp
max_rcpt = 25
connect_timeout = 10m
...
If anyone has any idea please advise me as I am totally confused and don't
know where to start!
Regards - Tom.
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