On 27 May 2010, at 18:08, Brent Jones wrote:

> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Simon Johnstone
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> <snipped>
>> Is this expected behaviour and/or am I missing something obvious? I imagined 
>> a successful delivery would *always* remove the retry hint (in this case, 
>> perhaps not even bothering to create one in the first place, since I suspect 
>> the delivery process adding the entry was the same to deliver the message 
>> moments later, when it tried the second MX).
> 
> I see that behavior as well, especially with Postini's greylisting
> (they will accept one recipient, but 400 defer another recipient to
> the same domain). Exim will abort the entire message, enter an entry
> into the retry database, and not retry any recipient to that domain
> until the entry expires.

I don't think this is the same behaviour - my problem seems to be that 
successful delivery to a non-primary MX does not clear the retry hint for that 
address.

What you're describing sounds peculiar for two reasons:

* a 4xx response for a single RCPT doesn't normally abort delivery if other 
recipients were accepted
* according to docs[1] when a recipient is deferred, retry lookups are keyed on 
the entire failing address, not just the domain

Do you have some non-standard config that may be causing this?

> Sometimes, I wish you could disable Exim's retry database and run it
> as a dumb server almost, but the benefits outweigh disabling it in
> most cases still.

There's a lot of power in the heuristics developed in Exim over the years to 
cope with all kinds of brokenness in an admirable fashion - my only gripe is 
that it's sometimes hard to understand *why* a particular behaviour exists, and 
the impact of changing it.

Simon.

[1] - 
http://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch32.html#SECID159
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