Introduction

exispool is a tool for handling exim message spools. Exim is a MTA that temporarily stores mails that are passing trough it in a spool. When exim is not able to deliver a mail to all its receipients, it can reside in the spool for quite some time. If a machine or server is wrongly configured and is sending out e-mails that have errors, the spool can quickly be filled up with a lot of messages. To keep the exim from trying to deliver all those e-mails one would use exispool with a few options to match the e-mails that are causing the problems, and either delete or freeze them. When a message is frozen exim will not try to deliver it again.

Download

The latest version of this program is exispool-1.0, for older releases see here.

Compatibility

exispool runs fine on Python 2.4, and it should not be too much work to make it work with Python 2.3.

Installation

exispool is self contained, and require no 3rd party modules.

Regressions tests

If you want to run regressions tests before installing it:

$ python tests.py

Configuration

exispool will try to look in /etc/exispoolcfg for it's configuration. The file should consist of a list of exim spool directories. If no config file is present one or more spools must be specified on the command-line.

If a configuration file exists and one or more spools are given on the command line the spools from the configuration file will be ignored.

Sample usage

To get an overview over what options are supported run this command:

$ exispool.py -h
Usage: exispool [options] spool1 [spool2 ...]

Options:
-h, --help                  show this help message and exit
-v, --verbose               be verbose
-V, --version               show version
-o FILE, --optionfile=FILE  spesify a configuration file at FILE

These options control which messages will be matched. ADDR is a regular expression:
-f ADDR, --from=ADDR        envelope from matches ADDR
-F ADDR, --hfrom=ADDR       header "From" matches ADDR
-t ADDR, --to=ADDR          envelope to matches ADDR
-T ADDR, --hto=ADDR         header "To" matches ADDR
-C ADDR, --cc=ADDR          header "Cc" matches ADDR
-S ADDR, --smtp-user=ADDR   exim smtp user matches ADDR
-m HOST, --from-host=HOST   message came from HOST
-b HOST, --by-host=HOST     message passed by HOST
-i, --invert                invert matches
-z, --frozen                match if message is frozen
-n, --not-frozen            match if message is not frozen

These options control what to do with messages that match:
-l, --list                  list matching messages
-L, --list-exim-id          only list exim message id
-p, --list-header-path      list path to header file
-q, --quiet                 disable default output
-d, --delete                delete matching messages
-c, --count                 print number of matches
-s, --size                  print total size of messages matching
-r, --freeze                freeze the messages
-H, --thaw                  thaw (unfreeze) the messages
-D, --delivered-domains     list delivered domains
-u, --undelivered-domains   list undelivered domains

ADDR and HOST are regular expressions and can be a partial address or host. To freeze and list the exim-id for all messages that has been via the machine lister.uio.no and the envelope from contains geo run the following command:

exispool.py -b 'lister\.uio\.no' -f geo -L -r

Structure

exispool-X-Y\
    README          This file
    tests.py        Regression-script
    setup.py        Installation-script
    exispool        This is the main script.
    testspool\      Directory containing a sample spool, used for testing
        ....