Mail Queue Manager (YY/NN/NY/YN)

[Estrac]

hi, this is a simple and quick question

In Queue, when you look inside email, you see all the RCPT's and in the begining you see diferent flags:

YY
NN
YN
NY

what does this flags mean?
example:
YY jtamez@webtelmex.net
NY jorgemv@etimex.com
NN jrquiroz@infosel.com

estrac

[PWSowner]

I know one of the 2 columns is whether or not the email was delivered to that address. I'm not sure which one and not sure what the other column is for.

[chirpy]

It's not as simply as that. Those two characters are quite tricky to explain:
http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.50/d....html#SECT52.1

It's to do with binary trees and how addressees are expanded and delivered. It does not indicate whether an email has or has not been delivered to a certain address.

[PWSowner]

Thanks for the correction and link. I've done a bit of reading at the website, but never read that yet. There's a lot there to read eventually.

[Estrac]

very tricky

thanks for the link

estrac

[mickoz]

It's not as simply as that. Those two characters are quite tricky to explain:
http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.50/d....html#SECT52.1

It's to do with binary trees and how addressees are expanded and delivered. It does not indicate whether an email has or has not been delivered to a certain address.

What is interesting thought is to understand that these email with [YN] before them help to see which one have been "successfully delivered". And the list after is the complete list.

From the exim's doc you gave:

Following the options there is a list of those addresses to which the message is not to be delivered. This set of addresses is initialized from the command line when the -t option is used and extract_addresses_remove_arguments is set; otherwise it starts out empty. Whenever a successful delivery is made, the address is added to this set. The addresses are kept internally as a balanced binary tree, and it is a representation of that tree which is written to the spool file. If an address is expanded via an alias or forward file, the original address is added to the tree when deliveries to all its child addresses are complete.

Having say that... having a tool or a set of commands to quickly find out:
- which email of a specific message has not yet been delivered
- how many email have been delivered out of "total"
would be very useful to analyze the information.

Maybe that would be a nice addition to your CMQ software Chirpy (which I just tried to try to be more efficient analyzing our queue). I don't doubt exim already has command for this.

* FYI -- I am currently investigating an issue with our newsletter sending (done with mailman to 50k+ people) that is taking a long time. A lot of mail are ending up staying in the mail queue for lot of time (24h+). I noticed there is a lot of message with 500 targets per message (I suppose mailman or exim limit the amount of chunk per message to deliver). If one of these target fail, the message stay in the queue (of course, that seem right to me), but for us, knowing that 499 out of 500 (or only 10 out of 500) have been succesfully delivered would an useful information to know (and would result in less or more panic respectively). Because in overview, we are afraid that it takes days for our weekly newsletter to be delivered to our members, and from the nature of our website, the delivery time matter as it announces the availability of a time-sensitive information (i.e. a meal plan with grocery list taking advantage of CURRENT flyers special, of CURRENT local product and a lot more time-sensitive information -- people are expecting to receive this in a timely manner. BTW the website is soscuisine.com if you are interested!).

* So if you have any other tips (or link) to help me better understand and possibly resolve the issue with "too many message staying in the queue", it would be greatly appreciated. I will continue my search...

* I personnaly won't panic if 99% of the email are currently delivered, but the message stay in the queue for X time (for retrying to send to the 1%). But if the number of target who received their message is very low, and then 90%+ of our member have to wait more than some hours to receive the email, it begin to get problematic.

[mickoz]

An interesting command I have found is:

exim -bpu

From the Exim's doc:

-bpu
This option operates like -bp but shows only undelivered top-level addresses for each message displayed. Addresses generated by aliasing or forwarding are not shown, unless the message was deferred after processing by a router with the one_time option set.

source:
command line option
http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.50/d...5.html#SECT5.3

--------------------

However, I notice that in some message, I see email of local forwarders (i.e. forwarder addresses that deliver only to local addresses) that are in this list of "undelivered top-level addresses".

And by looking at the spool log, they are in the list of delivered (the list with [YN] in front).

Maybe there is a valid reason for the local forwarders to stay in the undelivered list. However I can confirm that all recipients (going all level of forwarding deep) have received and retrieved the email.

Here is how the structure of a particular forward with this problem work:

top_level_forwarder_adress@ourdomain.com ==== redirect to ===> info@ourdomain.com

info@ourdomain.com === deliver to ====> info@ourdomain.com
=== redirect to ===> user_x@ourdomain.com

And, if I check the spool log in Exim, all these addresses appear in the list of delivered that way:

- top_level_forwarder_adress@ourdomain.com/virtual_aliases_nostar

- user_x@ourdomain.com

- info@ourdomain.com
- info@ourdomain.com/virtual_aliases_nostar
- info@ourdomain.com/virtual_userdelivery

So why the top_level_forwarder_adress@ourdomain.com email is included in the "undelivered" list as all the recipient (even after all translation of the forwarder) have received and retrieved the email?

Also if I force a delivery of this message... I don't see any of "ourdomain.com" address processed (because at less, they have been sent successfully). So maybe there is an action of "waiting" (to retrieve), but like I said, all possible users have received and retrieved it!

So... can someone explain why with -bpu (to see only undelivered email), I still see top_level_forwarder_adress@ourdomain.com in it ??

Thanks!