There appears to be a fairly major bug in the logic of exim 4.63

Scenario
********

Lots of emails on server A trying to send out though smarthost
Server B is smarthost but has a logfile greater than max allowed size

Expected Result
***************

Server B reports fatal error when server A trys to send email. Mail is 
queued on server A

Actual Result
*************

Server A sends message to server B, Server B queues message for delivery 
  but without logging. Server A records

defer (-18): Remote host eric.netmindz.net [78.129.143.156] closed 
connection in response to end of data

Server A will keep resending the email as per the retry settings until 
either the 4 day period kicks in or the log file is rotated on server B.
Server B will go ahead and deliver one copy of the email per attempt to 
deliver by server A


Realworld Result
****************

Mailout to 70,000 people turned into over 500,000 messages


I understand that it would be bad for an MTA to loose mail, but it's 
also bad to deliver a message that you told the sending server you were 
unable to accept. I am of course aware that this issue is partly "my" 
fault as it was triggered by logrotate not functioning correctly due to 
a bad config installed by another application, but it's still very bad 
behavior for exim





-- 
Will Tatam

*******************************************
Unite against human rights abuse in the 'war on terror'
http://www.unsubscribe-me.org

Amnesty International

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