Re: [exim] Retry on 550 errors

On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 05:38:44PM +0000, Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-12-05 at 09:25 -0800, Marc Perkel wrote:
> > And way to set exim up to conditionally retry on 550 errors instead of
> > bounce. This would be a situation where I know the 550 souldn't have
> > occurred and want to retry till the receiving host is fixed.#
>
> 5XX are permanent errors, retrying wouldn't make any sense.
>
> If that's not the intended behaviour then you need to talk to the admin
> of the receiving site and have them return 4XX instead.

The classic example is errors indicating that the user's
mailbox quota is overrun. This is of course a temporary
error, not a permanent one, but lots of sites nevertheless
report such errors using a 5xx code. Because many admins
at such sites are unwilling or unable to fix their MTAs (I
hear that some don't even ship with source code...) it can
be useful to be able to override the sending MTA's
response to such 5xx codes.

--
``Some people, when confronted with a problem, think,
`I know, I'll use regular expressions.'
Now they have two problems.'' (Jamie Zawinski)