At Loss with Mailing
To: Ray Olszewski <[email protected]>
cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: At Loss with Mailing
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 15 Apr 2003 08:28:02 MST."
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References: <5.1.0.14.1.20030415080234.01e96380@celine>
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Hi Ray,
The situation of me being unable to send mail is becoming worse. You are right the problem is not philonline. When I called them they said they never had reverse look-up. Since a few month ago I had no problem with them anyhow.
Now I found that even with skyinet and another new ISP mail will not be sent. The problem appears when I have difficulties making a connection and when connected the flow of data is very slow if any at all meaning the lines are hopelessly congested. The problem is/was less with skyinet since they have better equipment.
One solution would be to sent all mail with kmail which I have set to smtp for sending mail instead of using sendmail (this one will go out with it) which would mean giving up my beloved mailer exmh.
Or does somebody know how to set exmh (nmh) to use smtp for sending mail?
Regards
Peter
Quoted 24 lines · [email protected] said:
The issue is unlikely to involve philonline and *mail* as such. Your system uses its own MTA to connect directly to mine (or vger or whoever). It does not use the philonline server to process the mail.
I previously suggested that your problem appeared to be that philonline does not respond to a reverse lookup of your IP address. Nothing you have reported since then changes my opinion. Since you use a dial-up connection, you get a different IP address each time you connect; the "erratic pattern" may simply mean that some of these addresses resolve on reverse lookup but others do not. Combine that variability with the fact that some receiving MTAs require reverse lookups but others do not, and the resulting pattern could well look "erratic" ... it would be especially hard to spot if, say, vger itself did not run this check but its MX backup, zeus, did (pure speculation here; this is easier for you to check than me).
From the actual messages you report finding in the logs, I suppose
the problem might be with DNS at philonline. A way around that, at least for testing, is to run BIND (named) on your host and bypass the philonline nameservers entirely. This seems like a long-shot, though.I really have nothing else to suggest, Peter. If you try some of these
suggestions and have from them new results to interpret, please feel
free to write (or post, if you can) again.
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Riley's response may be right. Really, the technical parts of your description are too vague to permit anything more than a guess about what's up and his guess is as good as any.
Quoted 9 lines · Peter
The situation of me being unable to send mail is becoming worse. You are right the problem is not philonline. When I called them they said they never had reverse look-up. Since a few month ago I had no problem with them anyhow.
Now I found that even with skyinet and another new ISP mail will not be sent. The problem appears when I have difficulties making a connection and when connected the flow of data is very slow if any at all meaning the lines are hopelessly congested. The problem is/was less with skyinet since they have better equipment.
What does "difficulties maning a connection" mean? Really, the only ways to diagnose e-mail problems are:
1. If you get an actual refusal to connect to your SMTP client, it
will probably be logged by the client.
2. Use telnet (I described how in an eariler message) to connect
to a problem SMTP server and interact with it by hand. See what you see.
If your ISPs are actually blocking outgoing connections to port 25 (except to their own SMTP relay hosts, as RIley speculates), the second test will result in your being entirely unable to connect, NOT connecting slowly. And it will fail for ALL sites, not just some.
So ... since mail sent to this list, and to me, *directly* from your server gets here intact (the Received: headers on the copies that got here says that's how you sent them), I infer that at least philonline is NOT blocking your outgoing SMTP. If mail arrives here when you connect by way of other ISPs, then they too are NOT blocking SMTP connections. In that case, there is simply no way to tell you what is going on with the failed connections unless you do one of the two checks I outline above.
Quoted 5 lines
One solution would be to sent all mail with kmail which I have set to smtp for sending mail instead of using sendmail (this one will go out with it) which would mean giving up my beloved mailer exmh.
Or does somebody know how to set exmh (nmh) to use smtp for sending mail?
By "using smtp", I assume you mean here that the client is told to use an SMTP server that is not on the same host (in practice, your ISP's relay). MTAs like sendmail (I'm basing this on actual experience with exim, but sendmail should have equivalent functionality) can be configured to use a "smarthost relay" for sending mail, and you can use this capability to have sendmail use your ISP's SMTP relays. I don't know the details of this setup for sendmail, so perhaps someone else here who actually uses such a setup can supply them to you.
Quoted 3 lines
Regards
Peter
[old stuff deleted]
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Quoted 1 line · [email protected] said:
What does "difficulties making a connection" mean?
If I dial an ISP using i.e. kppp the window will show "logging on to network", will sit for a while, then disconnects from the modem and shows an error window with timeout message. Or using ifup pppx it stops with failed to activate with error 35.
If it does connect to the ISP then there is now data flow. Trying to open a website I get the error, unable to connect to remote host.
If during such condition I try to send an e-mail I get those errors, host unknown etc.
Two days ago before I sent the last message on this subject using kmail I tried to send 3 mails to individuals using exmh. All 3 ISPs I am using could not sent the messages except for one to @hotmail.com. This then shows up in /var/log/maillog as: queued for delivery.
These conditions exist usually in mid morning and mid afternoon when most likely the lines must be just jammed.
Regards
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Quoted 14 lines · Peter
Quoted 1 line · [email protected] said:
What does "difficulties making a connection" mean?
If I dial an ISP using i.e. kppp the window will show "logging on to network", will sit for a while, then disconnects from the modem and shows an error window with timeout message. Or using ifup pppx it stops with failed to activate with error 35.
If it does connect to the ISP then there is now data flow. Trying to open a website I get the error, unable to connect to remote host.
If during such condition I try to send an e-mail I get those errors, host unknown etc.
Quoted 7 lines
Two days ago before I sent the last message on this subject using kmail I tried to send 3 mails to individuals using exmh. All 3 ISPs I am using could not sent the messages except for one to @hotmail.com. This then shows up in
/var/log/maillogas: queued for delivery.These conditions exist usually in mid morning and mid afternoon when most likely the lines must be just jammed.
OK. Well, I think it is stating the obvious, but if you are having trouble connecting to your ISP, doing DNS resolution, and reaching Web sites ... asking what the problem is with your e-mail seems kind of the wrong place to be focusing your attention. You need to concentrate on the actual problem, which may be with the phone service, the ISPs, or your router or host (unlikely but just barely possible). Your guess about the source of the problem is a plausible one.
The one message to hotmail was, from your description, not really sent out. Your on-host MTA accepted it from the MUA you use. But it could not connect to hotmail so queued it up to try to reend later (that's how SMTP MTAs are supposed to work, since the protocol dates back to a time when connections routinely were not 24/7, even for the major sites of the time).
In any case, Peter, this certainly does not describe a problem with e-mail as such.
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