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I am using an Exim 4 server to send email out to a few customers, I am no linux guru but it works well.

One customer uses AppRiver, an we have been told we need to enable pipelining so they don't treat our email as spam. I spent hours googling trying to find out to enable this feature, but I cannot work out how. As far as I can tell it is enabled by default.

Can anyone help?

  • Pipelining is an ESMTP feature; can you verify that exim is using esmtp to deliver to them? You should be able to see in exim's mainlog file (it should specify the specific form of smtp used in each delivery). – itsbruce Nov 01 '12 at 22:00

1 Answers1

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First, the word "pipelining" has two meanings in SMTP.

  1. PIPELINING commands = an smtp client connects and just blasts the EHLO, MAIL FROM, RCPT TO, and DATA commands all at once (exim refers to this as command synchronization)
  2. PIPELINING messages = an smtp client connects and sends several messages per connection.

It sounds like they are speaking about #2. According to http://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch41.html#SECTmulmessam, with regards to pipelining to hosts over TLS connections:

Exim sends multiple messages down the same TCP/IP connection by starting up an entirely new delivery process for each message, passing the socket from one process to the next. This implementation does not fit well with the use of TLS, because there is quite a lot of state information associated with a TLS connection, not just a socket identification. Passing all the state information to a new process is not feasible. Consequently, Exim shuts down an existing TLS session before passing the socket to a new process. The new process may then try to start a new TLS session, and if successful, may try to re-authenticate if AUTH is in use, before sending the next message.

What that means is instead of what you expect:

connect->starttls->msg1->msg2->...msgX->quit

Exim does this:

connect->starttls->msg1->end_session->starttls->msg2->end_session...->quit

The above is from memory, I can't recall if "end_session" included disconnecting or not. But I helped a guy troubleshoot this behavior once in IRC and he figured out that the above paragraph meant that it wouldn't pipeline in the first way described if STARTTLS was used to encrypt the session. So unfortunately, the only comment I have is that if you force no TLS for this particular host, it should start pipelining the way they want it, but I feel that is not a good answer at all as I believe all email transfers should be encrypted.

Todd Lyons
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  • although here unrelated, for meaning #1 i found the following: control = no_enfore_sync to relax exim4s enforcement of how a client speaks to him. should be used in an acl, i.e. acl_smtp_connect – frisbee23 Feb 06 '13 at 10:47
  • Typo `control = no_enforce_sync` – ingopingo Sep 03 '18 at 13:44