Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

… I should have ended that with “fingers crossed”.

Narrowed the causes down to three seemingly unrelated problems.

• fetchmail now needs the envelope option to correctly feed email from Gentoo’s infrastructure into exim. I can’t tell whether something changed @ Gentoo’s end, with fetchmail, or with exim, but I didn’t need this before August 18th. Adding “envelope ‘Delivered-To’” fixed this one.
• exim and clamd have stopped co-operating on my box. clamd’s complaining that it’s being asked to scan files that don’t exist; exim is responsible for creating those files. Worked around this by disabling clamd support for now.
• exim is failing to resolve ‘localhost’ to an IP address. That’s a weird one, to be sure. The workaround was to replace ‘hosts = localhost’ to ‘hosts = 127.0.0.1′. What makes it weird is that logically the workaround shouldn’t work; for it to work, exim has to convert interal users like ’stuart@localhost’ to ’stuart@127.0.0.1′ first.

Once my email backlog is safely down, I’ll try upgrading to a later (unstable) copy of exim, to see if that fixes the two problems I’ve had to work around.

Anyway, with these three things resolved (for now), email gets delivered once more. It looks like I lost all email between August 18th and August 31st, and it looks like I lost most of the email between August 31st and today.

Fortunately, nearly all my email is either outright spam, bugzie spam, or Gentoo mailing list spam. Chances of having lost anything I’ll actually miss are pretty much zero.