Hi Scott,
i agree with what you say, at least the initial message should be conform
with the RFC821. But i have noticed that the number of companies with this
kind of setup increases. Not only universities have setup their mail servers
this way, also some mayor global companies. The problem is that a fast email
delivery is essential for us and our customers. To deal with postmasters, if
you find one, who resides somewhere around the world is difficult and time
consuming, trying to convince them, that their setup is not the best, is
usually wasting your time.
I cannot fully aggree with your conclusion:
"It is definitely the fault of the remote mail server, not IMail. They are
breaking the rules, and they have to accept the consequences."
You are right, these postmasters are breaking the rules, but they don�t care
about the consequences for their users.
Fast communication is very important in business, why should a mail server
wait to deliver mails (maybe for hours), if there is a easy way to do it
fast. Is it the best way to wait until a primary mail server is up again or
isn�t it much better to try a secondary server if available and deliver the
mail asap?
I like Imail very much, and i think it would be a good feature to handle it
this way. At the moment, the only solution for me to deliver mails to
misconfigured primary mail servers is to maintain a second system on a unix
box.
Heinrich
----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Perry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2001 3:16 PM
Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] Problems with mail delivery
> > Regarding this problem i contacted some postmasters of these domains.
> > At least one answered, that their primary MX record is for internal
> > use only and does not accept mail from outside their network ...
>
> They do not have their mail server set up properly. The MX record is an
Internet resource, so any Internet mail server is going to find their
primary mail server and try using it. If they want to play games like that,
they can just change their internal DNS server to point to their internal
mail server, and have real DNS point to the primary mail server.
>
> Technically, I think this is a "legal" setup. However, it is a very, very
poor setup and wastes Internet resources -- colleges should definitely know
better.
>
> > In all cases i found in the IMail log files that the response from
> > their servers is:
> >
> > 04:24 09:54 SMTP-(000000BA) 421 SMTP service not available, closing
> > transmission channel
>
> That's the Internet equivilant of hanging a sign on your store that says
"I'll be back in 5 minutes" when you retire. In Internet terms, it means
"The error condition is temporary and the action may be requested again.
The sender should return to the beginning of the command sequence." 421 is
normally used when a server is about to be rebooted. RFC821 makes it VERY
clear that any response code beginning with "4" indicates that the remote
mail server should keep trying.
>
> They should be returning "554 Transaction Failed: This mail server does
not accept E-mail from the Internet" or some such text along with the 554
numeric code.
>
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