Re: [exim] Failed to get write lock

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Author: W B Hacker
Date:  
To: exim users
New-Topics: [exim] Retry cutoff time
Subject: Re: [exim] Failed to get write lock
Mr David Robertson wrote:
> Many thanks. You make some very interesting points.
>
> I like the cut of your jib ;-)
>
> You may have talked me into some more aggressive retry rules.
>
> Regards
>
> David


*trimmed*

All you have to do for a 'safe' experiment is:

- leave the final quit alone at first, adjust only the initial retry.

Rotate your logs.

- restart Eixm and run the new settings for an hour or a day.

Run eximstats on the old log, then on the new.

Voila! It shows you the stats on deliveries and failures with their times.

Rotate the logs, try another setting.

I keep a couple of full year and multi-year logs for baseline.

Failure beyond ten minutes that retry will *ever* recover from is very
much the exception. IOW - fallback retry boxen should not be needed ven
IF your senders were zombots doing dictonery address attacks, ELSE MLM's
using 'harvested' lists full of stale addresses [1].

Not a lot of servers are on twice-a-week dial-in these days, and those
whose greylist want much over 5 minutes can safely be blacklisted to
keep your queue clean. Unless you are sending anime cartoons instead of
text, their user-communities probably couldn't read the messages anyway.

;-)

Bill

[1] any decent MLM can either park or purge bounced addresses on its
own, and according to its own settings for 'vacation' and such. That's
why we use 'em.