Undeliverable messages staying in queue forever

[fugtruck]

I have messages sitting in the mail queue that are undeliverable for various reasons (usually a bad e-mail address). Some of these are bounced messages and others are neither bounced nor frozen.

For the bounced messages, I have 'ignore_bounce_errors_after = 1d' in the Exim configuration file but they're not being dropped after 1 day.

For the others, I tried adding 'ignore_errmsg_errors_after = 1d' to the Exim config file but got an error, 'main option "ignore_errmsg_errors_after" unknown'. So I suppose this option is not available in Exim v4.

Any idea how I can get rid of these undeliverable messages after a set time?

[fugtruck]

Any suggestions on what I can do to fix this?

[cPanelTristan]

I can provide a suggestion on how to clear them using a cron if you are willing to go that route. The following cron command path will run at 1:00am server time every day of the week and remove messages in the queue that are older than 2 days (172800 is the number of seconds in 2 days time). If you want it to be just one day, that would be 86400 seconds so you'd use rather than 172800 in the command. Multiple the number of days desired x 86400 to get any other interval.

0 1 * * * /usr/sbin/exiqgrep -o 172800 -i | /usr/bin/xargs exim -Mrm

You'd place the above cron into /var/spool/cron/root or using crontab -e command in root SSH.

As for why ignore_bounce_errors_after is not working, it might be due to what is stated here (taken from 14. Main configuration location):

This option affects the processing of bounce messages that cannot be delivered, that is, those that suffer a permanent delivery failure. (Bounce messages that suffer temporary delivery failures are of course retried in the usual way.)

After a permanent delivery failure, bounce messages are frozen, because there is no sender to whom they can be returned. When a frozen bounce message has been on the queue for more than the given time, it is unfrozen at the next queue run, and a further delivery is attempted. If delivery fails again, the bounce message is discarded. This makes it possible to keep failed bounce messages around for a shorter time than the normal maximum retry time for frozen messages. For example,

ignore_bounce_errors_after = 12h

retries failed bounce message deliveries after 12 hours, discarding any further failures. If the value of this option is set to a zero time period, bounce failures are discarded immediately. Setting a very long time (as in the default value) has the effect of disabling this option. For ways of automatically dealing with other kinds of frozen message, see auto_thaw and timeout_frozen_after.

Possibly the setting time is too long and needs to be reduced to 12h or a lower value. I'm uncertain if you've also set auto_thaw and timeout_frozen_after values.