Topic: Retrieving MultiDrop email Problem(again)

[Kees Pimpelmees]

I've got this problem a couple of months ago, but for some reason I can't see my posts from that period in the EUForum, so I'll ask it again...

I'use e-smith to retrieve email for my domain (eg pimpelmees.nl) with a multidrop account (no multiple pop-account).

My e-smithbox has two NIC's (192.168.1.253 & 192.168.1.254). The first one I use to connect to my SmoothWallbox to dail up with ISDN. The second one is the one clients connect thru. The internal domain is the same as my global domain (eg pimpelmees.nl)

I configured the e-msithbox to use the external nic for internet and filled in the SmoothWallbox as my firewall/external proxy. Then I filled in the followings fields in the "E-mail retrieval" like below:

E-mail retrieval mode: Multi-drop
Delegate mail server: ip-address global mail server (eg 212.204.192.252)
Secondary mail server: name of global mail server (eg mail.pimpelmees.nl)
I set the times all to 5 minutes and filled in the user/password fields.

Then I rerouted the internal "mail"-subdomain to the ip-address of my global mailserver and tried to ping it. I got a response from the ip-adress I filled in the "Delegate mail server"-field, so I have an connection to the Internet.

Now here's the problem:
I don't get any e-mail ru e-smith. When I look in the "Basic Statistics" log I see the following:

"qtime is the time spent by a message in the queue.

ddelay is the latency for a successful delivery to one recipient---the
end of successful delivery, minus the time when the message was queued.

xdelay is the latency for a delivery attempt---the time when the attempt
finished, minus the time when it started. The average concurrency is the
total xdelay for all deliveries divided by the time span; this is a good
measure of how busy the mailer is.

Completed messages: 0

Total delivery attempts: 32
  success: 0
  failure: 0
  deferral: 32
Total ddelay (s): 0.000000
Total xdelay (s): 4.520379
Average xdelay per delivery attempt (s): 0.141262
Time span (days): 0.0728028
Average concurrency: 0.000718642"

In the "Reasons for deferral" log I see the following:

"One line per reason for deferral. Information on each line:
* del is the number of deliveries that ended for this reason.
* xdelay is the total xdelay on those deliveries.

del  xdelay  reason
 35    4.66  Sorry, I wasn't able to establish an SMTP connection. (#4.4.1)/"


Can anyone please help me, because I really getting a painfull indexfinger from scrolling thru the forums.

Kees Pimpelmees

[Kelvin]

Hi Kees,

As I understand it, your setup won't work. You should not be setting the Delegate Mail Server field. If you set this field, you are basically telling SME that any incoming mail should be transferred to the Delegate server for handling. Therefore, in your setup, SME will retrieve mails from your ISP then try and pass it back to your ISP again for processing !

In a typical Multidrop setup where SME is responsible for mail handling on the LAN, you should set the Secondary Mail server as the ISP Mail server where your multidrop mailbox resides and leave the Delegate Server BLANK.

Hope this helps.

Kelvin

[Kees Pimpelmees]

Thanx Kelvin, that did the trick eventually. It also helped that I used the correct IP-address this time.

I resolved the IP-address of my external mailserver via www.icportal.nl, but somehow it didn't give me the right one.

www.visualroute.com did give me the right one, so I'm able to send and recieve e-mail.

About the "Delegate Mail Server field", I am going to use that, because I want to use my Exchange 2000 server for e-mail, because Veritas can't back up e-mail on Linux. (I've I'm wrong, let me know, I'm prepared to go 100% Linux (read non-Microsoft)

Thanx for the help people!

[Kelvin]

Hi Kees,

For the backup problem, at some sites, I get around that by setting the SME server to backup to a file share on a Windows PC that has the tape drive (could be an NT / W2K Server), then the PC can backup itself and the SME backup as well.

Kelvin