On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 11:17:22AM -0500, Benjamin Pharr wrote:
| I'm trying to send e-mail to some of my friends that use Hotmail, and
| exim just can't connect to Hotmail's servers.
Yeah, hotmail is known for the low availability of it's servers. exim
will just keep retrying over and over until it finally hits an MX that
lets it connect.
| Some of the messages have been automatically retrying every day or
| so for a couple of months now.
That should never happen. Did you do something to your retry rules?
4 days should be the limit, and exim should report the delay around
every 24 hours or so. Is your system connected 24/7? If not then use
a smarhost and let it deal with the retries.
| I'm getting lots of messages like this in /var/log/exim/mainlog:
| 2002-07-16 11:08:40 16zmOO-0006h1-00 Remote host mx09.hotmail.com
| [64.4.49.71] closed connection after HELO localhost
This one could be because their server doesn't like you. Your system
shouldn't be calling itself 'localhost' either.
| 2002-07-16 11:08:40 16zmOO-0006h1-00 failed to open database lock file
| /var/spool/exim/db/retry.lockfile: Permission denied (euid=8 egid=8)
Just do this :
$ su root
# rm /var/spool/exim/db/*
# chown mail:mail /var/spool/exim/db
# chmod 700 mail:mail /var/spool/exim/db
# exit
Those "db" files are just hints so that exim can more efficiently
handle the routing of messages. For example, exim would store the
fact that the MX was unavailable and the time so that it could adjust.
| 2002-07-16 11:08:40 16zmOO-0006h1-00 mx14.hotmail.com [65.54.232.7]:
| Connection refused
[ad nauseum]
| 2002-07-16 11:08:41 16zmOO-0006h1-00 == tbomb003@hotmail.com
| T=remote_smtp defer (111): Connection refused
| Can anybody tell me what's going on?
It's Microsoft's problem, but you get the short end of the stick
because of it.
For a test of how bad hotmail's availability is, first use 'host -t mx
hotmail.com' to see that they have 15 MX records. Then run this script
to see how many of them are actually working at this time :
for ((i=1; i<=15; i++)) ; do
MX=`printf "mx%02d" $i`;
echo -e 'QUIT\r\n' | netcat $MX.hotmail.com smtp ;
done
I see 4 out of 15 hosts actually responding.
-D
--
A perverse man stirs up dissension,
and a gossip separates close friends.
Proverbs 16:28
http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/
Attachment:
pgp_kWJpEZbeC.pgp
Description: PGP signature