[SGVLUG] Couldn't send email. Race Conditions?

[David Lawyer]

On Sat, Dec 02, 2006 at 11:09:34AM -0800, yoshio wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 01:52:37AM -0700, David Lawyer wrote:
> > The night before last and yesterday, my email which I tried to send
> > never got sent.  It remained in the exim queue in spite of various
> > queue runner processes that attempted to send it out to the mail
> > server at my ISP: LA Freenet.  This problem has happened before, but
> > never was the delay in sending out messages this bad.  So I used the

Thanks, but I fixed this problem before I sent out the above email.
One reason for it, explained in my Oct. 25 post, was that the mail
never got delivered since the software kept repeatedly "selecting on
subprocess pipes".  That is, exim runs subprocesses of exim to handle
mail routing via a smart host (mail server at my ISP) and it wasn't
working.  Although I explained that I installed an updated version of
exim I neglected to state whether or not that fixed the problem, but
it seems to have done so.

> I had a problem with exim not sending out some emails in the queue,
> and the retry times would increase (this was exim 3.x).  I took out the
> flush exim script in /etc/ppp/ip-up.d and flush the queue manually:
> 
>         sudo exim4 -qqff &

I tried this with -qqf and it didn't work but gave the error indicated
above.  I have done something like this in my /etc/ppp/ip-up-d/exim4
script.
> 
> The "ff" option for exim does this:
>   "If ff is present, a delivery attempt is forced for every message,
>   whether frozen or not."

I only use one -f so as to not retry frozen messages but so as to
retry all non-frozen messages even if their retry time hasn't been
reached.  I've tried retrying frozen messages and have never got one
to go out yet.  The reason has been because an attached message I'm
sending out contains a virus since it's a copy of a message I received
with a virus.  So is there a was to get my ISP's server to accept such
attachments?  I'm sending out such email as evidence that I'm being
sent virii and it goes to my isp administration for them to complain
about to the originating isp.

			David Lawyer