Re: [exim] How does exim (as sender) handle timeouts on larg…

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Author: Graeme Fowler
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] How does exim (as sender) handle timeouts on large+recipient lists? (was: How to set exim to manage the number of CC or BCCaddresses?)
On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 23:32 +0100, Heiko Schlittermann wrote:
> Other question was - but probably it's implementation dependend - how
> the sender would behave. Does anybody know what exim would do. Restart
> the SMTP transfer with agin all 300+ recipients if recipient 300 times
> out? Or would exim try to reduce the number of recipients? (feature
> request?)


If it's a well-behaved MTA which respects the fact that the previous
connection never reached a positive conclusion (ie. didn't receive a
"250 OK" result for the entire transaction after sending the defined
"message ends" signal, ".<CRLF>") then it should start the whole thing
again after an appropriate delay.

Those who are interested should read Ch.30 of the docs:

http://exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch30.html

which include at the beginning the statement:

"If a message contains more than max_rcpt (see below) addresses that are
routed to the same host, more than one copy of the message has to be
sent to that host."

I expect that's what the OP is looking for in order to limit the number
of recipients per message - this is *not* the number of entries in the
"To:", "Cc:" or "Bcc:" headers when generated by the MUA, but the max
number of "RCPT TO:" commands invoked when talking to the remote MTA.

Graeme