Re: [exim] mail lost during nfs outage

On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 12:40 -0500, Jason Keltz wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I'm running exim 4.51 on our mail server (Linux kernel 2.4.31)
> /var/mail on our mail server is mounted from our NFS file server.
>
> The other day, during an outage of our file server, it seems that people
> lost mail. In one demonstrated case, a person received a message that
> contained only a "From" line. In my exim logs, I can identify the
> messages that were "lost" as follows:
>
> 2005-11-07 18:32:49 1EZGRr-0006XY-P7 spam acl condition: error reading from spamd socket: Connection timed out
> 2005-11-07 18:32:49 1EZGRr-0006XY-P7 <= someone@??? H=(0.0.0.0) [1.1.1.1] P=smtp S=2180 id=someid
> 2005-11-07 18:37:49 1EZGRr-0006XY-P7 ** |procmail <user@???> R=userforward T=address_pipe: transport filter timeout while writing to pipe
> 2005-11-07 18:37:49 1EZGYf-0007kB-U2 <= <> R=1EZGRr-0006XY-P7 U=exim P=local S=3033
> 2005-11-07 18:37:49 1EZGRr-0006XY-P7 Completed
-snip-

The above would suggest that in this case, the mail is not being lost,
it's failing to be delivered and is therefore bouncing (e.g., message
1EZGYf-0007kB-U2). If you're receiving messages that are incomplete,
I'd say that it's something like an external process (such as spamc)
that is breaking the message but not reporting failure, otherwise exim
would error (you'd see something like 'transport failed with error code
13').

I've had something similar before, and it was bogofilter doing something
similar (I think it was running out of disk space).

Cheers
Mike