I received this e-mail yesterday, and again today:

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exim paniclog /var/log/exim4/paniclog on quixote.home has non-zero size, mail system might be broken. The last 10 lines are quoted below.

2021-05-29 19:35:47 daemon: fork of queue-runner process failed: Cannot allocate memory
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I use Thunderbird for all non-local mail.
I am only using exim for local mail.
The only mail that I receive locally is a weekly e-mail from a cron job that I have set up to do backups, and I did receive that e-mail yesterday, along with the above e-mail.

I'm not familiar with the workings of exim, or any MTA, so I don't really know what the error message means, other than that there was some memory issue. The one clue that I have is that something (I am fairly sure that it was a Firefox tab) completely locked my system on Saturday night. Everything started slowing down. Mousing became erratic. Then everything completely stopped. I couldn't even switch to a terminal where I could kill Firefox. I finally had to simply power down the system. (How I hate doing that!) Then I rebooted, did a controlled shutdown and rebooted, again. After that, everything seems to be running just fine.

Is that likely the cause of the above message? If so, is deleting the paniclog the proper way to stop receiving these e-mails?

Marc