Hello, 

 A little over a year ago, I was pulled from my position as a software 
engineer to begin working as an admin for a company with no infrastructure. 
I initially installed qmail, but quickly switched to courier when faced with 
the need for a web interface. This was a measure driven largely to avoid 
having to install an exchange server, the "obvious" choice of those above 
me. (Thank you Sam for providing/maintaining such a robust a feature rich 
set of software.) 

 To date I have had few problems with mail service, or at least delivery 
failures were of unimportant mail and went unnoticed. Recently however we 
are having problems communicating with a number of new business relations, 
in particular Qualcomm and HP. This mail is critical and I am under 
considerable pressure to resolve it. 

 In an effort to solve things, I have read up a bit on the smtp protocol and 
yesterday rebuilt my system from the latest codebase at sourceforge, Courier 
0.37.2. This did not resolve the matter, but I thought I would get current 
before asking for help. Here is a snippet from my logs of a typical problem: 

Jan 27 08:06:26 reckoning courieresmtpd: started,ip=[::ffff:129.46.64.204] 

Jan 27 08:06:26 reckoning courieresmtpd: 
error,relay=::ffff:129.46.64.204,msg="5
02 ESMTP command error",cmd: XXXX warlock.qualcomm.com 

Jan 27 08:06:34 reckoning courieresmtpd: 
error,relay=::ffff:129.46.64.204,msg="5
02 ESMTP command error",cmd: XXXXXXXX 

My understanding is as follows. On connecting, a server may attempt
various extended smtp commands. A 502 error indicates that while the server 
understands esmtp, the particular command is unimplemented. The connecting 
server is then free to attempt other extended commands or step down to the 
standard default commands (smtp) for mail delivery. The 502 error is not 
uncommon in my logs, but it is also often accompanied with the subsequent 
successful delivery of mail. 

 In the problematic cases the user is sending embedded attachments from an 
outlook client (I am unfamiliar with the differences in how this translates 
in the resulting MIME formats) with the final delivery being attempted from 
a sendmail server. This error is reproducible, and consistently logged as 
above. I have read through the mailling lists and searched the web. The only 
apparent "problem" with courier are the issues surrounding 8bit MIME. Is my 
problem possibly related to this? Is it possible to get more verbose logging 
indicating what the attempted commands are? Do I need a packet sniffer? 

 I am at a loss and again under pressure to move to the "panacea of an 
exchange server". I know better, any input would be sincerely appreciated. 

Regards,
Todd VanderVeen
PartNET Systems Manager
801-891-0741

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