Looking for solution for frozen messages

[Robert Lister]

It sounds like the issue is not removing the frozen messages, but there 
is
a misconfiguration or other issue such that exim can't send the message, 
then
tries to send a bounce message, but the bounce message also fails, in
which case it will be frozen. (Or some similar scenario like it can't
send a message to another mail server then the bounces get stuck.)

Exim tries to avoid sending bounces which cause other bounces.

Best thing to do is look in the logs usually something like:

/var/log/exim4/mainlog
/var/log/exim4/rejectlog

This will give you more info on the problem.

If the config itself is broken to the point exim cannot continue,
there will be a file called paniclog. On Debian, if this file exists,
you will get an email to root once a day. (so the solution is to fix
whatever the problem is and delete paniclog.)

R.


On 2026-04-08 11:16, ael wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 06, 2026 at 08:17:20AM -0400, Haines Brown via 
> Pkg-exim4-users wrote:
>> By mistake I sent a message (mutt, fetchmail, exim) that was
>> missing a From: line in the header. As the result I'm deluged with
>> frozen messages.
> 
> I haven't tried this, but the exim man page suggests that
>   # exim4 -Mrm <message id> <message id> ...
> should work. That seems like the obvious thing to try.
> 
> ael