Tons of /usr/sbin/exim processes after v92.0.6 (email completely disabled!)

[highpec7]

Hi,

After v92.0.6 (I believe, considering I never noticed this before), every time you add an addon domain in cPanel, you get 1-2 of these processes per domain:

/usr/sbin/exim -Mc 1kuYLL-0000UX-BD

I just added ~10 addon domains and each process used like 0.12%+ CPU, which adds up rather quickly, especially since they take forever to go away.

EXIM and all email services are completely disabled on my server.
- EXIM disabled
- IMAP disabled
- Mailman disabled
- POP3 Server disabled
- Email feature itself disabled in packages

Why would EXIM be running for each domain added, when all email services are completely disabled?

CentOS7.9, WHM/cPanel v92.0.6

Thanks
highpec7

 

[cPRex]

Hey there! I tested this on my end and confirmed we still try and send the account creation email when any domain creation happens. I can also recreate the same processes appearing by creating an entirely new cPanel account on the system.

This happens because our tools call the sendmail binary, which is able to use Exim directly even though the processes that would actively be listening to handle user mail are disabled. Here is an example from the logs on my test machine:

2020-12-30 08:03:42 cwd=/ 15 args: /usr/sbin/sendmail -odb -ti -oMr esmtpa -oMa 127.0.0.1 -oMaa localhost -oMt __cpanel__service__auth__icontact__R0XTpC1PlSLS5iiC -oMs localhost -oMai __cpanel__service__auth__icontact__R0XTpC1PlSLS5iiC
2020-12-30 08:03:42 1kuc4k-0007sC-5A <= [email protected] H=localhost [127.0.0.1] U=__cpanel__service__auth__icontact__R0XTpC1PlSLS5iiC P=esmtpa A=localhost:__cpanel__service__auth__icontact__R0XTpC1PlSLS5iiC S=35768 [email protected] T="[10-2-32-250.cprapid.com] New account: fjdsofjdkf (mailtesting.com)" for [email protected]
2020-12-30 08:03:42 cwd=/var/spool/exim 3 args: /usr/sbin/exim -Mc 1kuc4k-0007sC-5A

This is normal behavior for the server, or else no notifications would leave the system at all, including details about problems that may exist on the machine.

If you're seeing many of those processes linger for an extended period of time there may be something else happening though, as my processes only lasted a second or two while the message sent. If you check "ps aux | grep exim" can you see them actively running?