Atomicorp

I've seeing a huge number of

possible qmail-smtpd exited by timeout, reset connection or with "See http://pobox.com/~djb/docs/smtplf.html.

in the maillogs of one of our servers.

Although I see quite a few of them from other IPs (look like commercial mailers/spammers), I'm seeing most of them in conjuction from mail from Hotmail IPs.

The curious thing is that when I send email via a hotmail webmail account, or via Live Mail (which uses the same range of IPs when sending), the emails come through perfectly. In other words I can't reproduce it.

Has anyone else noticed an increase in these in their logs? Has Hotmail done something stupid? I can't imagine they would be sending bare LFs randomly. I suppose it could be a timeout rather than a bare LF, but again, how could that be happening with hotmail?

I can't, for various unimportant reasons, install spamdyke (which fixes any bare LFs) on this particular machine, unfortunately.

Faris.

Oh, problem solved using fixiocr:

http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=94222

Scott, this is probably worth adding to the ART rpm arsenal as an rpm. Very useful.

Faris.

Oops. I've just seen that doing things this way screws up TLS somehow. I can't figure it out unfortunately.

EDIT: Arrgh. Seems it "just won't work" with TLS. You'd have to add DENY_TLS=1 to the env line to disable TLS. Bah!


Faris.

are you serious, TLS with hotmail is the problem?

No, Hotmail is sending bare LFs in messages from some of its servers. qmail rejects them. fixcrio basically adds CRs to any bare LFs, fixing the problem.

Unfortunately in doing so it breaks TLS.

So the only option is to disable TLS if you want to use fixcrio to solve the hotmail problem (and other mailers that send bare LFs, of which there are a lot, but mostly spammers).

Faris.

Way to violate the SMTP standards like a spammer microsoft...

There's a patch for fixcrio that bypasses the tls issue by looking out for them then not screwing things up. I've applied it and it works.

So, bottom line, if you have this problem, have a look at the Parallels forum thread mentioned in my second post, patch the .c file mentioned with the patch mentioned, install, and all will be well.

But it would be much better is Hotmail just fixed the damn problem in the first place.

fixcrio is a package in what, qmail?

It appears to be part of ucspi-tcp (http://cr.yp.to/ucspi-tcp.html) which includes tcpserver itself, rblsmtpd etc.

Faris.

well thats good news, I knew that sounded familiar. I maintain that for Project Gamera. It might be possible to adapt that for plesk again (I had done this before for a custom rblsmtpd)

Did the custom rblsmtp happen to log which rbl triggered the reject? If so, is there any chance of using your custom one too please?

Yes it does, its the same one we use in project gamera now.

I've just had a customer of mine email me saying he is getting this error message in Outlook when replying to emails.

"Your outgoing (SMTP) e-mail server has reported an internal error. If you continue to receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP). The server responded: 451 See http://pobox.com/~djb/docs/smtplf.html.

Strange this is I've never seen this error before on my server, so my question is, has an update come down the pipe recently that may have caused this to happen?

I hope not. There was a Microsoft update on Tuesday but I've not had any reports of issues. Everything certainly works with Outlook 2010. Not sure about earlier versions.

It is a strange one. I'm monitoring it for now, see what happens, but if anyone has any idea that would be cool.