Fix: Exim mail bounce back – retry time not reached

Sometimes, usually when you have been affected by spammer attack and your exim queue was full of the bad emails, you might have troubles sending out good emails. Regardless possible appearance in the blacklists, which is obvious, one of the reasons might be your own local exim. If exim has a lot of errors, it will start deferring emails for specific domain sender and/or recipient. Exim does it to keep itself less stressful (but this is just a very very very wild guess. 😉 ).

Anyway, you might have troubles and in the logs the following line would appear a lot:

exim retry time not reached for any host for -53

So how do you fix it? Very easy. You have to be root-user first. Then you simply run the following commands (expecting you are on Centos7).

cd /var/spool/exim/db
rm -f retry retry.lockfile wait-remote_smtp wait-remote_smtp.lockfile
service exim restart

That’s it – at least now exim will begin trying to deliver local emails to remote destinations.