[courier-users] timeout problem when receiving mail

Hi everybody,

i'm forwarding mail to external addresses via /etc/courier/aliases.
from time to time mail for one of these accounts doesn't get accepted.
this seems to coincide with courier waking up and trying to send all
the messages in the mail queue at once at the same time. i don't see
anything in the logs related to the delivery attempt of the inbound
message and the sending SMTP server gets a read timeout while waiting
for courier.

the mailq contains some hundreds of messages at times because of other
accounts that are aliased to gmx accounts, with the gmx mail server
limiting the number of e-mails it accepts per hour. in turn courier is
trying to re-send these messages every time it wakes up which takes a
couple of minutes. since the gmx mail server blocks my courier server
for a couple of hours (3 or four, IIRC) this re-sending occurs quite
often.

my questions:
* is it probable that these frequent re-sending attempts are the
reason why courier is not accepting incoming messages?

* what other possibilities are there?

* how do i configure the re-sending / shutdown+wakeup interval?

* since most of the forwarded mail is spam i am using the following
setup to filter it out (actually i'm testing it only on some
accounts): alias to local account, filtering spam with spam-assassin
and maildrop to local folder, forwarding the rest in the mailfilter
script to the destinations. i don't particularly like this forwarding
from the mailfilter script since for example it's a bit awkward to
correctly forward bcc'ed addresses and it doesn't feel quite the
canonical way. any suggestion on how to improve my setup?

i'm using courier version 0.53.3 on debian.


thanks a lot for advise/suggestions/help,
Volker.

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Volker Eckert writes:

> the mailq contains some hundreds of messages at times because of other
> accounts that are aliased to gmx accounts, with the gmx mail server
> limiting the number of e-mails it accepts per hour. in turn courier is
> trying to re-send these messages every time it wakes up which takes a

This is not the case. Each individual message is retried on its own
schedule. There is no frequent wakeup either, except for an occasional
restart which, if possible is scheduled when nothing else is pending.

> couple of minutes. since the gmx mail server blocks my courier server
> for a couple of hours (3 or four, IIRC) this re-sending occurs quite
> often.
>
> my questions:
> * is it probable that these frequent re-sending attempts are the
> reason why courier is not accepting incoming messages?

No, not as a direct consequence.

> * what other possibilities are there?

If a message to a given email address cannot be delivered, Courier will not
accept any more messages to the undeliverable address, as long as the
message remains undeliverable. Once the message is succesfully delivered,
Courier will resume accepting mail to that address.

This is done for individual email addresses only. If one email address is
undeliverable, mail to that address will temporarily not be accepted. Mail
to other addresses, even from the same domain, will continue to be accepted.

> * how do i configure the re-sending / shutdown+wakeup interval?

There are some knobs that let you control the scheduling parameters, they
are documented in the courier(8) man page. However I don't think you have
the correct impression on what's really going on in the first place. Each
message, for the duration of its existence in the mail queue, carries a
unique ID that's logged. You should pick a sample message and scan for its
ID, in the logs, to see for yourself when and when not delivery attempts for
this message occur. This will help you understand what's going on.


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