In the process of upgrading our server where mail for customers where being stored I had to take down the system. One thing is to give thousand of users downtime, they can (must) live with it, as long as you for instance do it during nights or so. An other thing is incoming mail, the system should be able to receive mail 24/7 at least as long as one have more than 1 incoming MX .
Normally Exim is run by the switch -bd -q5m, depending on the configuration in exim.conf Exim usually tries to deliver mail instantly and (ref. -q5m) a queue runner goes through the queue every 5 minutes and may or may not retry delivery of mail hanging in the queue (it may not retry mail where ‘retry time’ has not been reach) .
In exim.conf you may add the directive:
queue_only
meaning that for each incoming mail exim will queue the mail and not try to deliver it at once. Mail is then picked up by the queue runner process and delivered later.
By using this directive and by stopping exim and starting it manually with out the queue runner process:
exim -bd
I was able to queue all incoming mail at our MX and could do what I needed to do with the server where mail is delivered (that is for local deliveries) which in my case was about 3 hours of downtime.
When done I removed the queue_only directive and restarted exim with the queue runner again and everything was well 🙂
Sources:
exim.org