[Pkg-exim4-users] Spool file is locked (another process is handling this message)

[Gary Dale]

I've got exim4 handling sending e-mail on my home workstation (Debian 
Sarge) for test purposes. When I put it up on a small office server 
however, I ran into problems. At various times I have been getting some 
messages coming through, but right now I have nothing.

As near as I can tell, the two machines have identical exim4 setups 
except for the server and account names. The account information for 
/etc/passwd.client is taken from the SMTP settings in a working 
Thunderbird client, as is the SMTP server name.

The update-exim4.conf.conf looks to have the same basic information in 
both cases. I stepped through dpkg-reconfigure on both machines at the 
same time to ensure that I had the same values in both - just the exact 
names were changed to reflect different ISPs and local machines.

The messages that were coming through earlier were both my test messages 
and some cron job messages. An interesting note is that they were coming 
though as being from root at torfree.net, which is not the ISP I was using 
and has nothing to do with the system I'm sending them from. 
"torfree.net" is the domain I was sending the messages to, so I suspect 
this might have something to do with a misconfiguration earlier.  :)

Anyway, the immediate problem I'm having in trying to debug this is that 
every message I try to send ends showing up in the queue and logs as 
"Spool file is locked (another process is handling this message)". The 
messages stay in that state until they drop out of the queue after 24 hours.

Any ideas on what is causing this, and how I do I fix it?


My /etc/exim4/passwd.client file is in the form:
*:username at eol.ca:password


My exim4 dpkg-reconfigure file is:

# /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf
#
# Edit this file and /etc/mailname by hand and execute update-exim4.conf
# yourself or use 'dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config'

dc_eximconfig_configtype='satellite'
dc_other_hostnames='localhost.localdomain'
dc_local_interfaces='127.0.0.1'
dc_readhost='eol.ca'
dc_relay_domains=''
dc_minimaldns='false'
dc_relay_nets=''
dc_smarthost='mail.eol.ca'
CFILEMODE='644'
dc_use_split_config='true'
dc_hide_mailname='true'
dc_mailname_in_oh='true'

The other files are stock Debian/Sarge except that I defined 
AUTH_CLIENT_ALLOW_NOTLS_PASSWORDS.