[exim] Retry rules don't seem to work in 4.88

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Author: Dan Liles
Date:  
To: 'Exim-users'
Subject: [exim] Retry rules don't seem to work in 4.88
Hello everyone,



I seem to be having a weird problem with retry rules in exim 4.88



Right now when I send emails and I run the exinext command I see where they
say the failure was the same time as the next retry.



My main concern here is I seem to be getting my ips blocked by gmail and
yahoo at times even when I have a small send of say 10 emails an hour. I'm
wondering if it's because the retry seems so aggressive even though I have
it specified with greater delays. ( for example I sent 1,000 emails over
the course of an hour over 100 ip addresses and still ran across the problem
).



Ultimately with our marketing automation platform if people are sending out
content that's getting flagged / rejected by the major ISPs then we want to
know about it and shut it down. ( right now I'm just working on the
shutting it down part )



I've created the following rules to try to give up on a message if it's not
accepted after 4 hours maximum.





*                       lookup          F,4h,1h


*                                               refused         F,1h,15m


*                                               rcpt_4xx        F,4h,15m;


*                      *           F,2h,15m; G,2h,15m,1.5;




But for some reason I seem to see things in the queue longer. For example
right now I have emails that have been in the queue for over 7 hours - why
are they still there?



Here's a few examples when I run exinext



Transport: mailin-01.mx.aol.com [152.163.0.99/198.96.94.12] error 0:
H=mailin-01.mx.aol.com [152.163.0.99]: SMTP error from remote mail server
after initial connection: 421 mtaig-aac01.mx.aol.com Service unavailable - t

first failed: 31-Jan-2017 18:16:37

last tried: 31-Jan-2017 18:16:58

next try at: 31-Jan-2017 18:16:58



Transport: alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
[173.194.219.27/69.12.86.50]:1caOuw-000FHF-06 error -18:
H=alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [173.194.219.27]: Remote host closed
connection in response to end of data

first failed: 31-Jan-2017 20:49:46

last tried: 31-Jan-2017 20:49:46

next try at: 31-Jan-2017 20:49:46



You can see the last try and the next try have the same time. Does that
mean it's immediately retrying?



One thing I've noticed that I'm not sure if it matters.



The time on my servers running exim is way off - I can't set it but its like
6 hours ahead while another one will be an hour behind ( even taking in to
time zones of course ). Could that affect it? Remember I'm taking our
messages and bundling them to be inserted into the spool for now so I set
the timestamp in the file.



Is it possible this is causing a problem?



So with stuff sitting in the queue for over 7 hours and still sitting there
trying to be delivered - I just don't understand why..are retry rules just
not working, do I have a syntax problem that's causing my rules to be
ignored? How do I test them?



Thanks in advance everyone!



Dan