On 9/25/23 14:58, Rick Macdonald wrote:
Some of the mail in the queue is up to 4 days old. I'm going to clear
it all out to see what new arrives in this state.
I've made a bit of progress.
First, I deleted the almost 6000 messages in the mail queue:
# mailq | grep 1q | cut -c11-26 | xargs exim4 -Mrm
Then I noticed that I was still getting more, but always the same 4
messages. I checked on the Dreamhost server where I pull my mail from
and sure enough found those 4 messages "stuck" there. I deleted the 4
from Dreamhost, and now all is quiet for the moment.
These 4 messages were all spam. I think the mail in the "mailq" kept
growing because fetchmail was repeatedly trying but failing to retrieve
the same messages over and over.
I see a fetchmail option that might help, but I'm wondering if I might
then lose some non-spam problematic mail that fetchmail can't fetch?
*--nosoftbounce*
(since v6.3.10, Keyword: set no softbounce, since v6.3.10)
Hard bounce mode. All permanent delivery errors cause messages to
be deleted from the upstream server, see "no softbounce" below.
*--softbounce*
(since v6.3.10, Keyword: set softbounce, since v6.3.10)
Soft bounce mode. All permanent delivery errors cause messages to
be left on the upstream server if the protocol supports that.
Default to match historic fetchmail documentation, to be changed
to hard bounce mode in the next fetchmail release.
I'm running fetchmail v6.4.37. It appears that --softbounce is still the
default. Since they intend to change the default someday to
--nosoftbounce, maybe this option isn't as dangerous as it sounds to me?
Lastly, do I understand correctly that the root of this whole issue is
simply misformed headers in the original spam mail that I receive at my
Dreamhost account? Oh, and does all this lead to the "Frozen Message"
emails I receive (described in a prior email)?
Rick
