Bug#270129: exim4-config: Bounces generated from rewritten email addresses should go to original mailbox.

[Eduard Bloch]

Hallo,
* Marc Haber [Sun, Feb 06 2005, 05:37:12PM]:
> tags #270129 wontfix
> severity #270129 wishlist
> thanks
> 
> On Tue, Dec 07, 2004 at 09:03:40AM +0100, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> > However I don't intend to change this in the debian package.
> 
> Appropriately tagging the bug.

Sorry, I do not think that this is appropriate without providing an
applicable solution. Right now I am hit by the same problem. Yes, this
is a real problem and even the original bug report explained the use
case.

And ATM I see no straight-forward solution to solve this mess. What
happens is, that if there is some subtle smarthost configuration
error (like wrong SMTP password), the local bounces are generated
immediately. But because of the address rewritting, that bounces are
addressed to an external email address. And the delivery of the bounce
is rejected thereafter, keeping the message frozen in the local queue,
without ANY NOTICE TO THE ORIGINAL sender that the delivery has failed.

It does not even help to force a delivery after fixing the initial
config error. The bounces cannot be delivered if the smarthost rejects
mails without envelope-from (here: one of the major German mail
hosters). And the bounces generated like mentioned above AFAICS do not
have envelope-from, don't ask me why.

I guess there must be a simple solution for this. But it's not obvious
and it is NOT DOCUMENTED properly.

Regards,
Eduard.