On Sun, Sep 14, 2025 at 01:34:59PM -0400, Haines Brown via Dng wrote:
> I sent out a messge with mutt and exim. It froze because it may
> have lacked my sender address. Since then I get a message every
> minute like this:
>

>   Fail Delivery S ( 5)      Message frozen

>
> There is no indication of frozen mesasges in mail log. Resarting
> exim, fetchmail and mutt had no effect
>
> I try to remove frozen messages with
>
> $ exim -bpr | grep frozen | awk {'print $3'} | xargs exim -Mrm
> bash: exim: No such file or directory
>
> # service exim4 restart
> Stopping MTA for restart: exim4_listener.
> Restarting MTA: exim4.
>
> This has no effect. The exim -bpr command will not known
>

>   $  ps aux | grep exim
>   Debian-+ 15869  0.0  0.0  26228 14168 ?        Ss   13:14   0:00 /usr/sbin/exim4 -bd -q30m
>   haines   16433  0.0  0.0   6336  2028 pts/18   S+   13:29   0:00 grep exim

>

>   $ ps aux | grep fetchmail
>   haines   14787  0.0  0.0  12776  3296 ?        Ss   13:00   0:00 fetchmail -d 30
>   haines   16454  0.0  0.0   6336  1988 pts/18   S+   13:30   0:00 grep fetchmail
>   You have new mail in /var/mail/haines

Some general comments. Exim is way easier to configure than
sendmail, which it was designed to replace.

For debian, there is a single configuration file,
update-exim4.conf.conf, which is used to generate the final
config file or files. Only about 20 fields, and you have
to run update-exim4.conf or dpkg-reconfigure.

If still troubleshooting, I would inspect the two
directories, /var/spool/exim4/input and /var/spool/exim4 db.
Delete whatever doesn't belong and see if that helps.

I recently wrote about installing nullmailer, which routes
all mail through a smarthost. I might have used dma, the BSD
community has a reputation for good software, and dma seems
to have a decent number of users. Having a look at the bug
reports is one way to evaluate alternatives.

Have fun!

> --
>

>      Haines Brown 
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--
Joel Roth