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Need Sherlock Holmes . .

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phil at pricom

Jan 31, 2013, 9:19 PM

Post #1 of 4 (353 views)
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Need Sherlock Holmes . .

People,

I have something that doesn't make sense and I need suggestions about
how to track down the problem:

- I am using netqmail-1.06 with greylite and a qmail-qfilter Ruby
script of my own for spam blocking

- I can see from the greylite log that the problem mail is being
presented to the qfilter script

- I can see from my Ruby script logs that the problem mail is being
presented to qmail:

From: sarah [at] xxxx
To: phil [at] myserve
Cc: james [at] myserve

- I can see from /var/log/qmail/current that the mail is delivered to
james but NOT to phil !?

- I can see from /var/log/qmail/current that james' .qmail file
successfully forwards the mail on to another email address for james

- I can see from phil/.getmail/.maildrop.log that in fact the mail is
not delivered to phil and of course I do not receive the mail

- a mail from my gmail account to phil [at] myserve works fine

Anyone got any ideas about what I could do to work out what is going
on?

Thanks,

Phil.
--
Philip Rhoades

GPO Box 3411
Sydney NSW 2001
Australia
E-mail: phil [at] pricom

mail at oliwel

Jan 31, 2013, 11:43 PM

Post #2 of 4 (328 views)
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Re: Need Sherlock Holmes . . [In reply to]

Hi Phil,

I assume your are talking about a mail send from external via SMTP?

On 01.02.2013 06:19, Philip Rhoades wrote:
> People,
>
>
> - I can see from my Ruby script logs that the problem mail is being
> presented to qmail:
>
> From: sarah [at] xxxx
> To: phil [at] myserve
> Cc: james [at] myserve
>
> - I can see from /var/log/qmail/current that the mail is delivered to
> james but NOT to phil !?

Well, qmail delivers the mail based on the address which is given in the
SMTP envelop (as part of the transport session with RCPT TO) and does
NOT try to parse headers to make deliveries in this stage.

Your script environment should have "$EXT@$HOST" set, try to log that
and see what is happening. I guess that you are dropping the second
receipient from the environment.

Oliver

--
Protect your environment - close windows and adopt a penguin!
PGP-Key: 3B2C 8095 A7DF 8BB5 2CFF 8168 CAB7 B0DD 3985 1721

Attachments:

smime.p7s (4.34 KB)

search-web-for-address at pyropus

Feb 1, 2013, 5:22 AM

Post #3 of 4 (324 views)
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Re: Need Sherlock Holmes . . [In reply to]

Philip Rhoades <phil [at] pricom> wrote:
>
> - I can see from my Ruby script logs that the problem mail is being
> presented to qmail:
>
> From: sarah [at] xxxx
> To: phil [at] myserve
> Cc: james [at] myserve
>
> - I can see from /var/log/qmail/current that the mail is delivered to
> james but NOT to phil !?

Note that the above are the message headers, which qmail doesn't care about.
qmail will only deliver based on the message's envelope recipient(s). It is
perfectly possible that the message received only has james' in the envelope
recipient list, and not phil, despite the above headers.

You need to confirm that the message is actually being sent to both of the
addresses -- perhaps by snooping on the SMTP conversation with recordio or
tcpdump, or perhaps by getting the sending system's mail logs showing the
message being delivered for both recipients (if you trust the sending system's
postmaster).

Also: are you using a qmail-queue wrapper of any sort?

Charles
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Charles Cazabon
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phil at pricom

Mar 13, 2013, 8:09 AM

Post #4 of 4 (253 views)
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Re: Need Sherlock Holmes . . SOLVED [In reply to]

Charles, Oliver,

On 2013-02-02 00:22, Charles Cazabon wrote:
> Philip Rhoades <phil [at] pricom> wrote:
>>
>> - I can see from my Ruby script logs that the problem mail is being
>> presented to qmail:
>>
>> From: sarah [at] xxxx
>> To: phil [at] myserve
>> Cc: james [at] myserve
>>
>> - I can see from /var/log/qmail/current that the mail is delivered to
>> james but NOT to phil !?
>
> Note that the above are the message headers, which qmail doesn't care
> about.
> qmail will only deliver based on the message's envelope recipient(s).
> It is
> perfectly possible that the message received only has james' in the
> envelope
> recipient list, and not phil, despite the above headers.
>
> You need to confirm that the message is actually being sent to both of
> the
> addresses -- perhaps by snooping on the SMTP conversation with
> recordio or
> tcpdump, or perhaps by getting the sending system's mail logs showing
> the
> message being delivered for both recipients (if you trust the sending
> system's
> postmaster).
>
> Also: are you using a qmail-queue wrapper of any sort?

Thanks for your responses - since this domain does not receive very
many mails it took me a while to work out what was happening: it appears
that there was some sort of configuration error on a secondary name
server (not under my control) that produced intermittent errors with
mail delivery - so some mails were bounced with an error:

Technical details of permanent failure:
DNS Error: DNS server returned answer with no data

- that I wasn't aware of to begin with. Now that the DNS config is
fixed, I hope that is the end of the problems . .

Regards,

Phil.
--
Philip Rhoades

GPO Box 3411
Sydney NSW 2001
Australia
E-mail: phil [at] pricom

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