Yesterday I finally understood, why my Exim setup wouldn't give permanent errors when confronted with email to users that didn't exist on the server (anymore).

Instead, what my configuration yielded was something like temporarily rejected RCPT : error in redirect data: no local part in "@cyrus-local-delivery.tomster.org".

While of course not being exactly elegant this also had some other unpleasant side-effects. For one, I am currently hosting a domain of a once rather busy publishing company and you wouldn't believe the amount of newsletters the former employees are still receiving. In some cases these people haven't been working their for over two years. But of course, the newsletter bots keep on trying, afterall, all they ever get is a temporary error.

Well, that's fixed now ;-) So in case you're using my setup or something similar, you will want to take another look at it.

Now, that my scripts for maintaining the user accounts and passwords and my config files have been polished, I'm ready to take the next step: I want to keep the entire setup in XML-files and use XSLT-Stylesheets to create Exim's config files. Perhaps in Spring, when my current projects have been completed...