[Pkg-exim4-users] posts not appearing [new problem]

[Marc Haber]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 12:43:22AM -0700, Robert Holtzman wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Mar 2010, Marc Haber wrote:
>> I can only guess that cox.net (or some system further downstream)
>> doesn't like your envelope sender holtzm at localhost and silently drops
>> the message.
>
> Could you expand on the envelope you refer to? I haven't run across that  
> before.

2010-03-28 13:42:58 1NvzJy-0008En-9j <= holtzm at localhost U=holtzm P=local S=1177 id=20100328204258.GA31613 at cox.net

Your exim is sending out your messages with an envelope sender of
holtzm at localhost. The message envelope is something rather fundamental
in SMTP. The wikipedia article on SMTP does a reasonable good job to
explain this.

> Cox is normally clueless ("gee dude, lets check your settings" *ack*)  
> and level two is little better ("we don't see a problem on our end")
>
> I guess I'm locked into Alpine, at least temporarily, until I can find  
> what is dropping/blocking the mail sent thru exim4.
>
>> You may want to install the swaks package and test which messages are
>> actually delivered and which aren't.
>
> It would seem to me that the posts that show up are delivered and the  
> ones that don't show up aren't. What will swaks do beyond that? Will it  
> help pinpoint the problem location? What am a I missing?

swaks makes it easy to send out test message with different headers
and/or envelope and might assist in finding out when messages are not
passed on by some system further down the pipe and what needs to
change in them to get through. Some more-than-basic SMTP knowledge is
required though.

Greetings
Marc

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