Topic: Send mail issue

[srose]

Hi Guys,

hoping someone can help me with this issue, when we send an email through our SME server 7 to multiply users at with the same domain it delivers them as seperate emails, ie send an email to name@domain.com & name2@domain.com the email is delivered twice when i would have thought it is delivered to the end mail server as a once?

Regards
Simon

[NickR]

Why do you think that?

The receiving machine has no way of knowing what the onward routing of an email might be after receipt.  It might simply be relayed to another SMTP host depending on the envelope or other criteria.  The only sensible way to handle mail is on a per recipient basis, even if ultimately the messages all wind up in the same mailbox.

Think of the simple example of the SMTP server being set to reject messages to unknown users - how is it supposed to handle a reject to one or more invalid users when a valid user is included in the list?

To learn more about how SMTP works, have a read of the relevant RFC's:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc821.txt
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

[srose]

thanks for your post Nick,

We smarthost our mail through an upstream mail archiving service, they notified me this morning that this was happening and that because it is being received twice they are archiving both copies.

Simon

[CharlieBrady]

when we send an email through our SME server 7 to multiply users at with the same domain it delivers them as seperate emails ...

Yes, that's the way qmail works (always). Google for "life with qmail" for more details.

[NickR]

thanks for your post Nick,

We smarthost our mail through an upstream mail archiving service, they notified me this morning that this was happening and that because it is being received twice they are archiving both copies.

You're welcome.

I don't see archiving 2 copies as a bug.  Surely that's what should happen - the message went to 2 different addresses so there should be 2 messages archived.  It makes retrieval & searching of the archive so much simpler, albeit at the cost of extra disk space.