Topic: E-mail delivery problem

[Kevin Manderson]

Hi

I have had an internittant SME e-mail delivery problem for some time. Today I finally tracked a reason but am not sure how to do a rewritre rule to fix it.

Remote user sends mail to a BCC distribution list but does not use the To address line. Mail sends fine and delivers to my primary server. All mail for the domain drops into a common account, the gateway then polls the maikn server and splits mail for all known addresses and also sends unknown addressed mail to an info account.

Now back to the BCC which effectively has no recipient information after the first point of delivery. The gateway gets the mesage and only has the senders address. The mail is then bounced back eventually. Just checking another problem email it seems to do the same for CC as well.

Checking the mesage headers there is a information line with "for " but not as a valid to: line.

Are there any edits to qmailconfig files that will allow picking up on a the for line as well?

I am also going to look into a sendmail  fix to rewrite the deliery address again.

Any ideas?

kevin

[Charlie Brady]

Kevin Manderson wrote:

> Remote user sends mail to a BCC distribution list but does
> not use the To address line. Mail sends fine and delivers to
> my primary server. All mail for the domain drops into a
> common account, the gateway then polls the maikn server and
> splits mail for all known addresses and also sends unknown
> addressed mail to an info account.
...
> Are there any edits to qmailconfig files that will allow
> picking up on a the for line as well?

Neither qmail not sendmail can fix this problem for you. Your problem is here "All mail for the domain drops into a common account". That's called multidrop mail, which cannot be made to work reliably (read the fetchmail FAQ for details). If you were to SMTP forward from your "primary server" to the final destination server, it will "just work".

Charlie

[Kelvin]

Hi Kevin,

As Charlie said, this is a long standing problem with multidrop mail. Depending on your situation and ISP, there could be workarounds.

If you have a static IP address, you could talk to your Domain host to set up your SME server as the primary mail server (primary MX). If not, you could also try a dynamic DNS arrangement as well.

Another way is to ask and see if your ISP is willing to add another header to the mails (eg. x-delivered-to) to facilitate delivery. You can tell SME to sort on this header.

Yet another way is to see if your Domain host supports ETRN and to see if it is easy enough to configure (read as "customise") SME to support your Domain host's dequeue method (not all of them are the same).

Hope this helps.

Kelvin

[Kevin Manderson]

Thanks for the info.

Will investigate a few of the options suggested - ETRN being the most likely. The primary server is running sendmail so shouldn't be a problem. In the meantime I have configured the dns zone files so the machine is the highest priority MX entry, mail is delivering directly and all is fine (at least until adsl becomes unstable again as it does periodically...).

Help appreciated,

Kevin