The oddest mail failure

I have a customer who is using our outbound mail server to attempt to
send a single letter, with 137k of attachments, to 300 recipients. She
has tried through other outbounds and also through ours and the mail
fails every time. When they first reported this issue to us I checked
mail logs and saw a spate of 504 errors, of this kind:

504 <'foo@bar.net'>: Recipient address rejected: need fully-qualified
address; from= to=<'foo@bar.net'>

I told them they needed to check their address list and moved on to
another issue.

They call me today, say they checked every email address in the log I
gave them and if they send mail singly it's okay; but sent collectively
or even in groups of 10 or more it fails.

They have never sent in small group through us, just the monster email.
I understand they have some kind of legal obligation to send the mail
this way, so I'm not questioning why they just don't mail them one at a
time.

But what could be causing a failure of domain lookup in a mail? It's
not as if customers haven't sent large mails with large numbers of
recipients through us before. Could there be one failure that triggers
the remaining false negatives?

Puzzled,

David.

Re: The oddest mail failure

The recipient list contains
'foo@bar.net'
whereas it should contain
foo@bar.net

By the way, are you certain that the address had ' single quotes and not "
double quotes? Single quotes are not special, so the correct
interpretation of
'foo@bar.net'
is going to user
'foo
at site
bar.net'

However, the error message that you report suggests that the SMTP server
treated it as a quoted string, and looked for a local address with
embedded "@" and ".".

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Re: The oddest mail failure

This doesn't look like a DNS problem. It looks like a recipient restriction
problem. Does the server config include reject_non_fqdn_recipient? I'm
betting it does. Try removing the restriction.

Re: The oddest mail failure

Dom,

I wouldn't be surprised if it works, but given that I'm not an internal
company resource but working for ,
wouldn't it be a bad idea in general to turn off not fully qualified
recipient rejection. I'm sure MYTOB would have a field day sending to
fred, jack, joe, jill etc @ foo.com if I do.

David.

Re: The oddest mail failure

What was posted was a direct cut from the mail logs, with the names
changed to protect people's privacy. I'm pretty sure the quotes were as
seen there. What I can't tell you offhand is the syntax used in the
"monster"; I may have to ask our customer what it is..

Re: The oddest mail failure

Removing the restriction really wouldn't make a huge difference. It will
prevent failed DNS lookups for invalid recipient domains... not a giagantic
savings of resources. Sounds like Mark has pinpointed the problem, though.

Re: The oddest mail failure

Hi,

dwmyers@my-deja.com schrieb:
> What was posted was a direct cut from the mail logs, with the names
> changed to protect people's privacy.

Ok when the singel quots where in the log-File it is obvious that your
customer send an email like 'foo@bar.de'. Postfix checkt if it is a FQDN
and sag hey one moment there is no at because it treads the hole address
as a username.

RFC say to email Formating:

Foobar
or
Foobar (foo@bar.de)

>I'm pretty sure the quotes were as
> seen there. What I can't tell you offhand is the syntax used in the
> "monster"; I may have to ask our customer what it is..
>
So the first thing that I would check out is that your customer ist
sending mails korrekt. Maybe he use a special tool for the monster mail
and that get's the mails misspelled form a DB or an other source.

Alexander