Page 2 - Mail Server / Hotmail Problem

Ok, that makes sense. It just seems odd for it to have worked before, and not now considering I made no changes. I appreciate your efforts in helping me out here.

Telnet response from 65.54.252.230

220 mc6-f38.hotmail.com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 5.0.2195.6713 ready at Thu, 1 Jan 2004 17:59:41 -0800

Seems to be working... So in this instance, I just touch "smtproutes" and then vi smtproutes and enter in just "hotmail.com:65.54.252.230" into one line, save and restart services and then test to see if it is working? Sorry for the trouble, just making sure the steps I take are correct.. Thanks again...

>> save and restart services and then test to see if it is working?

Yes. And if you have existing messages in the queue they should get out in no time.

Made the changes as you suggested, but still no love. Nothing changed, still cant send recieve to hotmail. I am out of ideas now, but that didnt work unfortunately.

So what did the log say?

Same again :

Jan 1 21:54:54 ns1 qmail: 1073022894.525108 delivery 1562: deferral: Sorry,_I_wasn't_able_to_establish_an_SMTP_connection._(#4.4.1)/

I just dont get it, I havent altered anything previously just doesnt make any sense.

Jan 1 22:01:58 ns1 qmail: 1073023318.843989 delivery 1557: deferral: Sorry,_I_wasn't_able_to_establish_an_SMTP_connection._(#4.4.1)/
Jan 1 22:01:58 ns1 qmail: 1073023318.844062 status: local 0/10 remote 0/20 exitasap
Jan 1 22:01:58 ns1 qmail: 1073023318.865729 status: exiting

This message is infact different that previously, "exitasap" whatever that means. I also noticed that the same problem exists with msn.com emails aswell.

There are a couple of things you can try:
1) telnet to that port 25 (try other IPs too) and invoke the SMTP comands by hand. If you don't know how to do this, search the web and see how to communicate with a SMTP server manually via shell prompt
2) Use smtproutes again, but hand off the mail to your ISP
3) Make sure you restart qmail-send, not just qmail-smtpd

Beside your little details on your qmail setup, you should provide all other relevant info such as your DNS, the nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf, your real domain name, your type of firewall and rulesets relevant to DNS and SMTP and others.

Before I try them I just got a postmaster message from hotmail, which I have never got before with all the other test emails Ive been sending. This is from hotmail to my server, and it bounced back to hotmail with this message :

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.

Delivery to the following recipients has been delayed.


In your opinion does this demonstrate that it is hotmail that is screwing up? I havent got any of the other emails bouncing back with this message, only this one just then. I dont know if thats a good sign or not, I still havent recieved it but it says it's delayed so it has me thinking that hotmail is just backed up or something and I'll get bombed with 50 test emails sooner or later lol.

Until you provide some details of your info, it's relatively difficult to determine.
Though there is one thing you can tell is that the #4.4.1 is not permanent. Since you been getting this consistently it could be your misconfiguration, your firewall, hotmail's fault, or even your upstream.

Ok, all of this is starting to get over my head. Im looking into the manual stmp commands and it seems very difficult. You mentioned the error is not perminant, would the fact that one of our service providers miss announced some of our IP blocks with their upstream provider yesterday have anything to do with it? Maybe it takes 48 hours to re-update from something like that? I dismissed this as a problem however, as another server on the same network can send/recieve to hotmail fine although it is a different IP block.

I wasnt getting these problems constantly, started only in the past two days coincidentally (or not) after the IP problems with my provider which were rectified yesterday. I thought of the firewall settings, and overall mail server mis-config but considering it sends/recieves fine to other address I dismissed that as a problem also. No changes have been made what-so-ever to the setup since then, so it's really bothering me.

Im still trying to dig up better tutorials on the manual stmp commands, but having no luck... seems complex from what i've found. If I can find any more errors, or any other information which could help to determine the issue in more detail I will post them here. Once again, thanks very much for your time and help with this matter...

You repeatedly refuse to provide your DNS data and real setup, can't help you any further, good luck.
I don't want to see what you think is happening, I want to see actual DNS data, you can say I trust no one.

Sorry, I am not sure what you mean? How do I get the DNS data that you require?

1) The content of /etc/resolv.conf
2) Are you running your own nameserver/cache, if not who are you using?
3) The unedited output of qmail-showctl

This is to freebsd. I have a similar problem with Hotmail on Qmail.

System server Configuration:
Intel Pentium i386
Slackware 9.1.0 with gcc 3.2.3
Netqmail 1.04 (qmail 1.03 + patches for QMAILQUEUE)
ucspi-tcp-0.88, daemontools and all the stuff that is on lifewithqmail.org. Also i added a POP3D and Courier-IMAP 2.2.1.

I can receive ALL email from anywhere (including HOTMAIL).
I can send email anywhere, excluding HOTMAIL. BUT i can reply to a hotmail message and it will go back to hotmail. But not being able to send an initial message to hotmail isnt good enuff.

I am not runnign a DNS on my 192.168.x.x network. The main DNS is the router which gets the DNS data thru DHCP from the ISP. I read about opening port 53 TCP & UDP on the firewall/router because Hotmail DNS UDP packets are being split due to size larger than allowed by a signle UDP packet. TCP was supposed to remedy that, but nothing happended. So i close the 53 ports. All i have open is 25.

I can pretty much telnet into port 25 on any hotmail MX server or IP and do some "mail from" "rcpt to" and "data" and send it. Hotmail didnt accept that message, prolly due to some block, but nonetheless telnet works. I wonder if my ISP cannot get the correct MX DNS data from hotmail and it fails. So I put this into

/var/qmail/control/smtproutes:
mx2.hotmail.com:65.54.252.230
hotmail.com:65.54.253.230

and qmailctl stop and qmailctl start. Nothing changed. Same old.

Here is the output of the qmailctl stat run as root:
/service/qmail-send: up (pid 797) 1805 seconds
/service/qmail-send/log: up (pid 798) 1804 seconds
/service/qmail-smtpd: up (pid 801) 1804 seconds
/service/qmail-smtpd/log: up (pid 802) 1804 seconds
messages in queue: 0
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0
/service/qmail-pop3d: up (pid 814) 1805 seconds
/service/qmail-pop3d/log: up (pid 815) 1805 seconds

In /var/log/qmail/current there is not signs of anything going wrong. Hotmail accepts each and every message I send to it AND I never GOT an error message from HOTMAL. NEVER!!! I send 20 emails to my account, none of them made it, but they all had this respectively in the /var/log/qmail/current file:

@400000004000634a32e5c70c new msg 61790
@400000004000634a32e620e4 info msg 61790: bytes 1318 from <slack@sub.sytes.com> qp 404 uid 1002
@400000004000634a33279a9c starting delivery 3: msg 61790 to remote someuser@h
otmail.com
@400000004000634a333127ec status: local 0/10 remote 1/20
@400000004000634c2429ba84 delivery 3: success: 64.4.50.99_accepted_message./Remo
te_host_said:_250__<00ac01c3d7b9$8ec14be0$0202a8c0@xp>_Queued_mail_for_delivery/
@400000004000634c242a81bc status: local 0/10 remote 0/20
@400000004000634c242ab09c end msg 61790
So not a signle SMTP error message that It cannot do something. NADA.

This is the output of smtpd/current under /var/log/qmail

@40000000400080f404b3451c tcpserver: status: 1/20
@40000000400080f404b3c21c tcpserver: pid 952 from 192.168.2.2
@40000000400080f407a7482c tcpserver: ok 952 slackserv.sub.sytes.net:192.168.2.
11:25 :192.168.2.2::4012
@40000000400080f40b2848fc tcpserver: end 952 status 0
@40000000400080f40b289b04 tcpserver: status: 0/20

This file seems okay... or is it?

If anyone has any idea as to what is going on(or rather why hotmail is deferring my stuff) I'd love to hear. If more data/logs/etc is needed let me know.

Many thanks in advance!

slack

Folks

I have the exact same problem here.. For what its worth,
this issue just started a couple of days ago.

I even tried patching dns.c using the big-DNS patch
from URL
And qmail seems to have the problem only with hotmail.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

somanglow