[exim] exim send to greylisted host

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Author: Mardy Hutchinson
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: [exim] exim send to greylisted host
Hi, first time posting -- please be gentle.

I was asked to look at a customer's machine, and found that it was not
delivering to Yahoo. Over 10,000 messages in queue.
The machine is used to, (among other things), send out to an opt-in mailing
list.

Apparently Yahoo is "aggressively" greylisting this host.

This looks much the same as reported by Catalin Constantin in April, to
which a resolution was not posted.
(Thread:
http://www.exim.org/lurker/thread/20090420.130417.b1f8d218.en.html#20090420.130417.b1f8d218)

None of the remediation efforts seem to work well at draining the queue,
except for one.

/usr/sbin/exim -bd -q5m

The current retry section reads:

begin retry

yahoo.com rcpt_421 F,7d,1s
yahoo.com rcpt_451 F,7d,1s
yahoo.com mail_421 F,7d,1s
yahoo.com mail_451 F,7d,1s
yahoo.com data_421 F,7d,1s
yahoo.com data_451 F,7d,1s
f.mx.mail.yahoo.com rcpt_421 F,7d,1s
f.mx.mail.yahoo.com rcpt_451 F,7d,1s
f.mx.mail.yahoo.com mail_421 F,7d,1s
f.mx.mail.yahoo.com mail_451 F,7d,1s
f.mx.mail.yahoo.com data_421 F,7d,1s
f.mx.mail.yahoo.com data_451 F,7d,1s

*                      *           F,2h,15m; G,16h,1h,1.5; F,6d,8h


# End of Exim 4 configuration

What happens is that each queue run gets a
421 Message temporarily deferred - 4.16.51. Please refer to
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html

and there after all messages report with:
xxxx@??? R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp defer (-53): retry time not
reached for any host
for the rest of the queue run.

In other words, my attempt to reset the host timeout is ineffective.

* * *

What does work, after a fashion, is a forced queue run from the crontab:

46 */6 * * * /usr/sbin/exim -oB5 -Rff @yahoo.com

eventually all messages get their first 421 temporarily deferred, and then
the next attempt for the same message ID delivers it,
unless yahoo returns:
421 4.7.0 [TS01] Messages from 75.125.183.146 temporarily deferred due to
user complaints - 4.16.55.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts01.html

* * *

Is there a way to ignore the hints database for "yahoo.com"?


Is there anything else that will allow the remote host's greylisting to work
as intended?

-- Mardy