Travis Crump says: > Jerry Baker wrote: > >> I just discovered this nasty bug. It cost me 5 days of outgoing email. >> Mozilla pretended to send the outgoing messages when, in fact, they >> were never sent. Although the situations where this might occur are >> probably relatively rare, the severe consequences of this bug made me >> want to post this warning. >> >> When this bug happens to you there is no way to know that something >> wrong has occurred. There is no indication that something has failed >> until all of your contacts start asking why you haven't emailed them >> in a few days or weeks. Even then, you might not ever be able to know >> what is happening. >> > > Note that this is also probably a bug of some sort in microsoft's mail > server. I just tried to relay through a postfix server and got an error > saying that relaying was prohibited and through an exim server where I > got a connection refused(my only basis for thinking exim was running is > that cron was running and exim is the installed MTA) error message >
It's not a bug in the MS mail server. What happens is when the MS mail server is configured to only accept mail from particular hosts, and your host isn't one of them, it terminates the connection immediately. The TCP connection is initially successful, and then it is terminated by the MS server before anything is sent. Mozilla fails to detect that the connection has been closed and pretends to send mail. What makes this so bad is that Mozilla is not getting any responses to any of its SMTP commands and yet it doesn't throw an error.
