[SLUG] "The Case Of The Missing Mail"

[Gavin Baker]

I was going to send this to the mailing list admin, but I thought others
would be interested.


Yesterday my mail started vanishing.

My mail, and mail for others in our household, is set up in a way that
makes it extremely easy to handle. A box here (sliver) fetches mail from
all our separate accounts out there on the internet, and we use imap to
fetch our mail from sliver. This means sliver can scan all our mail for
spam and viruses, and, all our mail is stored on sliver, so we can use
more than one MUA to read our mail; it's read online from sliver.

Sometimes, you just can't win.

After i found my sherlock homes hat, I started tracking down the
problem. Our mail is handled by uw-imapd, fetchmail, spamassasin, razor,
clamav, exim, procmail, courier-imapd, postfix, and numerous MUA's. Lots
of things could go wrong.
 
My SLUG mail is sent to the domain registrant who forwards it to an
account on a domain I own, sliver fetches it from there. After it leaves
the domain registrant, the path is entirely Linux and opensource
software based. Guess which OS the registrant uses for mail? Guess where
the problem was?

SMTP error from remote mailer after MAIL FROM:<foo at bar.org> SIZE=1514:
host eforward.foo.com [212.xxx.xxx.xxx]: 452 4.3.1 Out of memory

SMTP error from remote mailer after initial connection: host
eforward.foo.com [63.xxx.xxx.xxx]: 421-Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, 
Version: 5.0.2195.6713 ready at  Service not available, closing 
transmission channel\n

It's viruses are probably using all it's memory, but how hard can it be
to forward email?

I would think it was funny if lots of mail hadn't been delayed for 2
days...

If I don't reply, or post for a few days, you know why. It's Microsoft's
fault, damn it.

Gav

-- 
Gavin Baker <gav at supercowpowers.org>