[exim] What to do when a message is locked

Hi list,

Scenario: Sending an announcement to thousands of recipient addresses and then
          suddenly remembering that you forgot to include a vital piece of
          inforamtion.

In the above scenario it's not possible to prevent the message from being sent
to any more recipients by marking all recipient addresses as delivered:

exim4 -Mmad <message-id>

because all you get is:

Message <message-id> is locked.

So, how can you limit the damage?

One way is to kill the queue runner subprocess by doing something like this:

kill `ps -C exim4 -o pid,command | grep <message-id> | cut -d\ -f1`

and then removing the message from the queue with:

exim4 -Mrm <message-id>

but killing the subprocess is ugly to say the least.

Is there not a better way?

When describing the various '-M' comands the Exim manpage repeatedly points out
that "the status of active messages is unaltered" but nowhere does it say what
to do about 'active' messages.

Finally, is it safe to take:

"Message is locked."

to mean

"Message is active, status unaltered".

in manpage-speak?


Regards,

Sebastian
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