My initial posting was going to make some fairly pointed comments about qmail but it
*appears* that this list server is also using that software and the problem doesn't
happen there. Anyway, on with the story ...
Some of my users have found that when they send e-mail to particular organisations,
the mail simply disappears into the ether with no error message being reported back to
the user. The one thing that these organisations have in common is that they use the
same ISP who is using qmail. Investigation of the log shows that their server reports
a syntax error when our server sends the SIZE command and it quits the connection
after that.
The ISP in question (WebCentral) is located in Australia and is part of the OzEmail
group of companies (I am led to believe). They say they have 30,000 domains
registered at their site so that's 30,000 domains full of users who are not going to
get e-mail from part of the world, apparently, because their server simply drops the
mail.
We spent some time researching this and discovered that it had been discussed (and
solved) on this list so we sent the URL which describes the patch. Their response
was:
"... patching / recompiling applications from source code will require stopping the
services (necessitating downtime) for a situation that has been reported only once in
the history of our operation"
closely followed by
"the code is a patch against a different version of the qmail source code (and one
that has yet to be audited) there is no guarantee that
such a patch would compile correctly or even patch cleanly against the source code or
any other modifications our administrators/developers have made".
One wonders what sort of other modifications their administrator/developers might have
made. Perhaps those mods are the cause of the problem. Anyway, I am curious to know
what other qmail site admins have to say about this and also what the qmail developer
thinks. Personally, I think it's really bad PR for qmail.
David Stafford
Melbourne, Australia
