exim4 acl_whitelist_local_deny change causes some blacklisting

This was simpler…

We test some anti-spam tools on the TTLLP mailserver. Some of those include exim ACLs that do various checks and tricks. Since the upgrade to debian 5.0, some of our incoming email had been delayed. The first problem is summarised by this NEWS entry:-

“exim4 (4.67-6) unstable; urgency=low

acl_whitelist_local_deny was renamed to acl_local_deny_exceptions
to avoid confusion. This means changes to ACLs, file names in
/etc/exim4/conf.d/acl and the exception list file names themselves.

This was my mistake. I was so preoccupied with the DEBCONFsomethingDEBCONF change during the upgrade that I overlooked this ACL rename-without-transition-or-warning. Apologies to anyone who had email delayed by that – it only resulted in a 4xx deferral and we’ll probably get it soon. Some email got through anyway.

That said, I’m a bit puzzled as to why test-exceptions is any less confusing a name than whitelist-test and I think the confusion from the renaming is worse.

The other thing that is slightly puzzling is that our my_hosts list stopped working. I’ve not found anything relevant to that one in the docs yet.