Re: frozen Exim message

[David Cannings <lists@edeca.net>]

On Wednesday 05 May 2004 20:16, Paul Yeatman wrote:
> I'm curious about Ronny's question, however.  I suppose the problem is
> that screwed up messages created from spam and viruses can't really be
> distinguished from ones that are legit but had a delivery failure for
> whatever reason (wrong mail setup, server down, etc.).  Although,
> once a message is frozen for more than 5 days, what's the chances it
> is legit?

For this, we use a Perl local_scan script on our server that runs mail 
through SpamAssassin and Sophie (virus scanning).  Messages can then be 
dropped at SMTP time with a 5xx instead of them being bounced.

> I'm also curious why some mail gets frozen instead of returned.  For
> instance, my machine now has a frozen message on it that was sent from
> the postmaster of another machine.  This email is returning a
> contaminated message "from" a bogus user on my machine with the info
> that the original message contained a virus.  Why didn't the Exim on my
> machine return the message to the postmaster with "no such user"?

If the original message looked like a bounce, Exim wont bounce it back.  
Instead it freezes it to "flag" your attention to it.  If you want to 
bounce it, use -Mg <messageid> which will remove it from the queue and 
send a message to the original user.  To remove it totally without 
informing anybody, use -Mrm as suggested earlier.

Hope that makes sense,

David