Exim temporarily rejected after DATA error happens when Exim stops allowing incoming and outgoing mails.

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Let’s examine how our Support team resolves exim temporarily rejected after DATA in more detail.

Exim temporarily rejected after DATA: How to Solve ?

When Exim stops allowing incoming and outgoing mail, we will see this error message in the main log and reject log.

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root@bobcares [~]# less /var/log/exim_mainlog | grep bobcares_test@gmail.com 2022-06-27 10:00:00 1ctJtT-0003lC-PY H=mail-it0-f44.google.com [209.85.214.53]:38898 X=TLSv1.2:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:128 CV=no F=<bobcares_test@gmail.com> temporarily rejected after DATA 2022-06-27 10:00:00 1ctJzY-0006Dt-AS H=mail-it0-f53.google.com [209.85.214.53]:37295 X=TLSv1.2:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:128 CV=no F=<bobcares_test@gmail.com> temporarily rejected after DATA

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Something about ACL in the exim configuration file is the problem. By adding a comment to the following line in /etc/exim.conf, we can fix this issue:

acl_smtp_data = check_message

After commenting out the above line, restart exim and verify that all services are operational. Sending emails should now works flawlessly.

What if the error persists?

If the problem persists, it could be a permissions issue with the exim log file(s). Exim appears to be set up to create its own log files rather than logging to syslog, but filesystem permissions prevent it from doing so. What files and directories are going to affects depends on the distribution and configuration.

Running exim -bd -d+all should aid us in resolving the issue because it will print debugging information to stdout and indicate which file could not write. Check that the file(s) in question are own by the exim mail user (for the user name, use ps auxw | egrep exim) and that the directory exists and is also own by the exim mail user.

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Conclusion

To sum up, we can fix the exim temporarily rejected after DATA error by updating /etc/exim.conf and restarting the EXIM service.