Hi,
I'm trying to figure out Exim's behaviour in the following (real-life) scenario.
A mail gets sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is a list, and expands to:
-----------------------------------------------------------
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is a mailbox and forwards to:
-------------------------------------------------------
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is a mailbox and forwards to:
-------------------------------------------------------
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is a mailbox and forwards to:
-------------------------------------------------------
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is a mailbox and forwards to:
-------------------------------------------------------
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is a mailbox and forwards to:
-------------------------------------------------------
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is a mailbox and forwards to:
-------------------------------------------------------
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is a list and expands to:
-------------------------------------------------
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is a list and expands to:
-------------------------------------------------
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
etc.
My understanding is that Exim first tries to figure out where it's going to
route the mail to, and only then starts to deliver the mails once it has
figured out all the final destinations of where to deliver the mail to. All of
this happens in memory, yes?
With the above scenario, you'll see that a "list" forwards to a lot of
mailboxes and to another "list", which all in turn point to each other etc. I
should probably mention that in this particular scenario, the user also
configured vacation auto-replies on all the mailboxes :-) ("list" is basically
an alias..).
The nett effect was that a server with 4GB RAM and 2GB swap ran out of memory
while trying to deliver this particular mail.
Now a few questions:
- Given the following:
mailbox10: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
mailbox20: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
list10: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
A mail message get sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
How far will Exim go in delivering the mails? I've set 'check_ancestor' in
my routers where applicable.
- What's the best way of telling Exim to not use more than X amount of memory?
I don't see any configuration in Exim itself, so will it best to just setup
resource limiting for Exim on OS level?
I know how to setup resource limiting in FreeBSD (in login.conf), any hints
to set it up on Ubuntu?
There's some resistance to using daemontools, so .. :-\
- Without seeing my configuration file (which I unfortunately can't share at
this point in time), do you think I'm just doing something stupid?
I mean, it's a very unusual scenario, but it happened and I'm now trying to
find ways to prevent this from happening again.
If I can hear what the expected behaviour would be of the mail sent to
mailbox10@, I'll probably know if I am, or not...
FWIW, I'm running Exim 4.60 on Ubuntu Dapper.
Mrmf, oh, and after figuring out who configured the above, I was told that all
${clown} wanted to do was to test the mailbox quotas.. :-)
Jaco
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
the faculty of making fortunate discoveries
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