I have a client trying to send email to an ISP and sometimes it works and
sometimes it does not. In the log it shows "Too Much Load".

The ISP's response is that there is something wrong on my side.  Any have
any ideas on this?  Here is the message:
Let's skip the message for a second, and look at the logs:

> 20030220 063318 127.0.0.1 SMTP (272) Trying oro.net (0)
> 20030220 063318 127.0.0.1 SMTP (272) Connect oro.net [209.77.110.102:25] (1)
> 20030220 063318 127.0.0.1 SMTP (272) 421 Too much load; please try again later
> 20030220 063318 127.0.0.1 SMTP (272) SMTP_DELIV_FAILED
> 20030220 063318 127.0.0.1 SMTP (272) >QUIT
This shows that IMail connects to their mailserver, and it responds with a message that in computerese says "I'm busy right now, please try again here later." IMail should retry that IP later.

What do the logs say after the above log file entries? Does IMail bounce the message (it should not), or does it retry it later? Do you have IMail set up with some very strict settings, such as to bounce E-mail that isn't delivered on the first attempt?

oro.net has 4 primary mailservers (with no backups); an attempt to connect from http://www.DNSreport.com 's Mail Test showed that 3 of the 4 responded, with 1 not responding (the one that gave you the 421).

You appear to have a few mail servers there which are
misconfigured to use invalid names instead of connonical names
when saying "HELO" as required by the RFC's.
This is a bunch of hooey, hogwash, or whatever your favorite term for nonsense is.

The didn't even accept your HELO/EHLO. They decided not to allow the connection when they sent you the SMTP greeting, so you never had a chance to send them the HELO information.

According to the Ipswitch mailserver, your mailserver identified itself as mail2.ncws.com. That has an A record, and is perfectly valid.

Generally, only spammers do this. To be RFC compliant, the name a server calls
itself in the "HELO" or "EHLO" command must be connonical.
Well, connonical isn't a word, but it sounds like they mean a fully qualified host name, which indeed it should be. But they never got your host name (or if they did, it was from another log file snippet). Note that a number of legitimate mailservers do not meet this requirement.

It *should* also resolve to the IP address the server is actually
using, and DNS should also return that IP address, and reverse
DNS should also return that connonical name.
True, but rarely is DNS set up this well. And it is nearly impossible in real life, when you have virtual hosts.

Our servers don't require all this (although they will insert
warning headers if any of this is out), but they do require a
cononical name in the "HELO" field.
In this case, you'll need to check your logs to see if there are any cases where you do send them the EHLO (or HELO) information. The log file snippet you sent showed a problem on there end, but not one that would cause the mail to bounce.

-Scott
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