On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Simon Johnstone
<simon@???> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Encountered a strange issue I was hoping someone might be able to explain. Exim 4.69/Debian (although a 4.71 source build seems to do the same).
>
> An email was sent on the 19th to a domain with two MXes:
>
> * first MX responded to 'RCPT TO' with a 4xx code (greylisting, AFAICT)
> * second MX accepted the message
>
> However, a retry entry was still created:
>
> R:john@???:<simon@???> -44 13133 SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<john@???>: host mx2.SOMEDOMAIN.co.uk [xx.xx.xx.xxx]: 451 Deferred: Temporary error, please
> 19-May-2010 00:27:48 25-May-2010 22:58:40 26-May-2010 04:58:40 *
>
> Fast-forward to today - the retry time (4 days) has expired, which seems to be causing subsequent messages sent with the same retry key (recipient:<sender>) to bounce *immediately* if both MXes return a 4xx code (which they do, again due to the other end's greylisting).
>
> Is this expected behaviour and/or am I missing something obvious? I imagined a successful delivery would *always* remove the retry hint (in this case, perhaps not even bothering to create one in the first place, since I suspect the delivery process adding the entry was the same to deliver the message moments later, when it tried the second MX).
>
> Thanks,
>
> Simon.
> --
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>
I see that behavior as well, especially with Postini's greylisting
(they will accept one recipient, but 400 defer another recipient to
the same domain). Exim will abort the entire message, enter an entry
into the retry database, and not retry any recipient to that domain
until the entry expires.
Sometimes, I wish you could disable Exim's retry database and run it
as a dumb server almost, but the benefits outweigh disabling it in
most cases still.
But I'm still struggling to find a proper way to handle these cases.
--
Brent Jones
brent@???
