exim not working properly

[BardiaMGTGC]

today i was going to send an email to one of our clients that i found out exim isnt working
first i tried it with roundcube then firefox thunderbird but none of them worked
after taking a look at logs (exim/main.log exim/panic.log exim/reject.log maillog) i found these lines mostly

too many syntax or protocol errors (last command was "\001??n?\005?\005\001?????", NULL)
Failed to create spool file /var/spool/exim//input//1lMGzb-0005sa-8j-D: Permission denied
2021-03-17 00:42:28 1lLIrB-0007qp-PV Failed to create directory "/var/spool/exim/db": Permission denied
2021-03-16 14:36:37 H=mail.domain2.com (PLESK.home) [one of my servers ips] X=TLS1.2:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:256 CV=no F=<[email protected]> temporarily rejected RCPT <[email protected]>: Could not complete sender verify

first line which says syntax errors i tried to change some settings in exims web configuration but while trying to save it fails and gives me an error

Error message from syntax check:
2021-03-17 00:54:11 Exim configuration error in line 100 of /etc/exim.conf.buildtest.work.d6614ecd:
main option "smtputf8_advertise_hosts" unknown

i tried removing this line from /etc/exim.conf that didnt work
exim.conf.local doesnt exist
i tried removing it from advanced editor but it fails because of the same error even tho i removed it
it just comes back


about the line that says perm denied for /var/spool/exim/db
this directory exists and it has some files inside it (caillout, misc, retry, and some other files)


exim restarts with systemctl but restarting with the /scripts restart file it fails and gives me an error

exim has failed. Contact your system administrator if the service does not automagically recover.


in roundcube i get smtp error 250 authentication failed

i didnt add anything manually to exims configuration

 

[kodeslogic]

Please share output for the below commands:

# ls -ld /var/spool/exim

# ls -ld /var/spool/exim/db

# yum list installed |grep -i exim

 

[BardiaMGTGC]

Please share output for the below commands:

# ls -ld /var/spool/exim

# ls -ld /var/spool/exim/db

# yum list installed |grep -i exim

there you go

[root@cp log]# ls -ld /var/spool/exim
drwxr-x--- 6 mailnull mail 55 Mar 14 21:16 /var/spool/exim
[root@cp log]# ls -ld /var/spool/exim/db
drwxr-xr-x 2 mailnull mail 213 Jun 2 2020 /var/spool/exim/db
[root@cp log]# yum list installed |grep -i exim
Failed to set locale, defaulting to C
exim.x86_64 4.94-1.el7 installed

 

[kodeslogic]

I suggest opening a ticket using http://tickets.cpanel.net/ for further investigation.

 

[cPRex]

@BardiaMGTGC - if you have opened a ticket, can you please post the number here so I can follow along? You can also try backing up and then resetting the Exim settings using the WHM >> Exim Configuration Manager interface to see if that makes a difference in the behavior.

 

[BardiaMGTGC]

after resetting exim i get
Configuration is functional. Waiting for “exim” to restart …………Gracefully terminating process: exim with pid 13308 and owner exim. Waiting for 13308 to shutdown ........... terminated. Waiting for exim to shutdown ... not running. …………failed.

Cpanel::Exception::Services::StartError Service Status
exim (/usr/sbin/exim -bd -q1h) is running as exim with PID 10058 (systemd+/proc check method).

Service Error
(XID jt59jg) The “exim” service failed to start.

Startup Log
Mar 17 20:40:40 cp.sigrid.ir systemd[1]: Starting Exim Mail Transport Agent...
Mar 17 20:40:40 cp.sigrid.ir systemd[1]: Started Exim Mail Transport Agent.

exim has failed. Contact your system administrator if the service does not automagically recover.

i will try downgrading exim see if that helps

 

[cPRex]

That's odd that the rest didn't resolve the issue. I'd recommend submitting a ticket to our team so we can check the server directly. If you do that, please post the ticket number here so I can follow along and keep this thread updated.

 

[James Schweda]

Did this issue ever get resolved?
I appear to be facing an identical problem.

 

[cPRex]

@James Schweda - since the original poster did not reply with a fix, I can't say for sure what the resolution was. If you have root access to the server you're always welcome to submit a support ticket to our team so we can investigate this directly on the machine.

 

[BardiaMGTGC]

i completely forgot about this forum
after doing a force upgrade to latest version from whm problem was resolved

 

[James Schweda]

Thank you @cPRex and @BardiaMGTGC

My problem had been caused by my choice to use dnf to update the system's software rather than WHM.
Moral of the story: sudo dnf update = bad

I appreciate the help!