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Re: Why doesn't Exim ever clean out /var/spool/exim/input?



Joe Emenaker wrote:

Here's a question that has always been bugging me.

Ever since we moved from smail to exim many years ago at my isp, exim never seems to discard messages in the input queue.

Even though the single retry rule is the stock one (which retrys for something like 4 days), we end up with stuff that is weeks... months old. Periodically, it would get pretty full and we'd notice that there were about 10 queue runners going and so I'd go in and do a "find" and remove anything older than 14 days or so. I *had* to do a find, because doing an "ls" would just sit there an churn for about a half-hour.

Does the output of the "mailq" command provide any useful information about these messages? My first guess would be that you're dealing with "frozen" messages. These are messages that exim is unable to send *and* can't be returned to the original sender.

If that is the case, have a look at the "timeout_frozen_after" setting; this will automatically remove messages after being frozen for a certain period.

Regards,

Maarten Vink



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