On 14/8/08 11:25 PM, "Wietse Venema" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Robert Cohen: >> So if a filter botches handling one message, postfix gives on sending it >> anything for up to 15 minutes? >> That doesn't seem like a particularly graceful way of handling filter >> failure. > > When a destination suffers from a PERSISTENT FAILURE (i.e. your > content filter is dropping connections persistently), then Postfix > will avoid wasting further resources on that destination for > $minimal_backoff_time. > > Some people would take this as a hint to solve the problem, instead > of flaming Postfix for reporting the bad news. > Well, sorry if my message came across as a flame. It was more intended as a problem report. But perhaps I didn't explain my point very clearly. I'm happy to leave it there, but in the interests of clarity, I'll have another go at explaining my point. As far as I can tell, the error wasn't a persistent error, it was a transient error. In fact milter was fine and could (and did) continue to process mails just fine after postfix recovered. The milter simply couldn't process that particular email. But I can see its difficult for postfix to distinguish between transient errors and persistent errors. So the behaviour may well be a reasonable default behaviour. However, the fact that the milter was fine, and postfix wouldn't process mails made it appear that postfix was the one with the problem. In particular, the error message lost connection with 127.0.0.1[127.0.0.1] while sending message body is fine for the mail that couldn't be processed. But the fact that that it continues to emit the same error for all further emails is rather misleading. If the error had said something like "filter marked as down due to persistent errors" it would have been rather easier to follow. ======================================= Robert Cohen Systems & Desktop Services Division of Information R.G Menzies Building Building 2 The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 Australia T: +61 2 6125 8389 F: +61 2 6125 7699 http://www.anu.edu.au CRICOS Provider #00120C =======================================
