Topic: Sending mail from Clients Problem

[Craig Main]

Hi all,

I have recently installed a server with SME Server 5.6. All seems to be
setup fine, however...  there seems to be an intermittent problem with
the mail. The clients are running Outlook (various flavors). When
checking the mail settings, outlook reports everything to be fine. When
trying to send a mail however, it fails with a smtp timeout error.

I have installed amavis-ng and clamav. The setup for that seems fine.
The error occurs whether I have the qmail-queue.amavis or the
qmail-queue in use.

Has anyone seen this before? Got any pointers?

The server is also doing file sharing and that seems to be working fine.
POPing mail from the server appears to be working fine too.

TIA
Regards
Craig

[Craig Main]

I am getting this in the Logfiles when the client tries to send mail:

Jun 18 14:11:55 hope PAM_pwdb[13854]: authentication failure; (uid=101) -> admin for pwauth service

Please can someone help?

TIA
Craig

[Howard Jacobson]

I am having the exact same problem, only I've not done anything to my server in months, and the problem just arose today.  I can ping my mail server but SMTP from Outlook 2000 times out.

HAJ

[Howard Jacobson]

One additional data point is that my smtpfront-qmail log file has entries like this for every time I try to send mail from Outlook but get a timeout error:

@400000... smtpfront-qmail[nnnn]: bytes in: 0  bytes out: 38

The "..." indicates a hexadecimal number.
The "nnnn" indicates a four digit base-10 number.

Thanks.

[Charlie Brady]

Howard Jacobson wrote:
 
> @400000... smtpfront-qmail[nnnn]: bytes in: 0  bytes out: 38

That means your (Outlook) clients connect, but then send no data (0 bytes).

Charlie

[Howard Jacobson]

>> @400000... smtpfront-qmail[nnnn]: bytes in: 0 bytes out: 38

> That means your (Outlook) clients connect, but then send no data (0 bytes).

Well, the question then is why Outlook isn't sending anything because Outlook works fine when I change the SMTP server to point to one of my other e-mail accounts.  Any ideas?  Again, this just suddenly started today.  Thanks.  HAJ

[Ben Hinton]

I'm also having the same problem. Outlook 2000 has been connecting through my E-smith server no problems up until yesterday.

Being a beginner to E-smith, I have no solutions to offer

Best wishes,

Ben

[Greg Jones]

Did anyone sort out what was causing this problem? It's now happening at our site as well. We haven't made any changes to configuration for some time.

This is all very wierd.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Greg Jones
Jacus - SoftwareWorks

[Greg Jones]

As a follow-up:

I've turrned up the timeout from 1 minute (default) to 2 minutes on my Outlook clients and they eventually do get a response from the SMTP server and manage to send mail. So, it looks like it's really a qmail problem.

Now I just need to find out why qmail is suddenly running so slowly.

Any ideas, anyone?

[Greg Jones]

Yet another follow-up

We have our system setup to use spamcop (amongst others) to check incoming connections against the spam black-lists. According to another message on this board (http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=8072.msg30121#msg30121), there have been a lot of DOS attacks against these sites lately.

If you are using similar software, there may be delays in validating the originating IP address and this may be the cause of the delay in accessing the SMTP server (it can take over a minute for my server to display its welcome message).

I haven't tried turning off the spam checking to test out this theory yet, but it seems like a plausible explanation (at least to me).

Hope this helps,

Greg J.

[Brian Hand]

I have exactly the same proble, just appeared this morning out of the blue!

[Darrell Lewis]

I have a site that has just developed this problem too.

Sending email from Mozilla or Eudora - 50-60 seconds watching the sending window then - whoosh it's gone.

Anyone found a resolution to this one yet?

[Van]

This is a problem here as well -- my users are from 3 sets of public IP addresses -- we have over 500 users -- many are complaining of very slow outgoing mail & timeouts -- any way to raise priority of SMTP?

[Charlie Brady]

Van wrote:

> This is a problem here as well -- my users are from 3 sets of
> public IP addresses

Point 1: SME server isn't designed for clients sending from public IP addresses - usually clients are on a local network with private IP addresses.

Point 2: If there are delays, it's likely because reverse DNS isn't set up correctly for the sending IP addresses. Reverse DNS for those addresses is not under the control of the SME server.

Charlie

[Van]

Ah, Am I using the wrong solution? we are a small ISP -- I do have the public ranges defined as local networks.

I'll have to research about the reverse DNS

Van