Sendmail rejecting Blat generated email

Hi there,

I have written some software that sends e-mail messages using the Blat
system. [Quick brush up on Blat: It basically allows you to
systematically build an e-mail message, and then easily stream it to an
SMTP server. Previously we were basically passing emails along to the
e-mail client loaded on the customers machine, which is an ugly way to
handle things IMHO.] This is on the Windows platform, so I have Blat as
a DLL on my machine. Anyways, this all works great on the systems we've
tested it on, including talking to Exchange 5.5, Exchange 2000 and
postfix servers.

We deployed the product at a customers site that is using sendmail.
Sendmail however, doesn't appear to like the e-mail we are passing it
since it is rejecting it. Specifically, the customer forwarded the
following from their maillog...

Oct 17 11:49:20 hostname sendmail[1374]: _msg_id_: telecorp1.domain.com
[X.X.X.X] (may be forged) did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during
connection to MTA

Well, obviously this problem can be solved two ways, by me changing how
blat communicates with the SMTP server or by them changing a
configuration in sendmail (if that's possible). Can anyone give me
additional clues as to what's going on, what I would have to ask them
to modify in their sendmail?

I didn't do much to the blat project aside from downloading the project
and compiling it down to a DLL, so I'd rather have them change the
sendmail if possible...

Anyways, any recommendations are greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Matt Fuerst

Re: Sendmail rejecting Blat generated email

This is a MIME GnuPG-signed message. If you see this text, it means that
your E-mail or Usenet software does not support MIME signed messages.
The Internet standard for MIME PGP messages, RFC 2015, was published in 1996.
To open this message correctly you will need to install E-mail or Usenet
software that supports modern Internet standards.

--=_mimegpg-commodore.email-scan.com-7893-1131061909-0006
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Matt Fuerst writes:

> Sendmail however, doesn't appear to like the e-mail we are passing it
> since it is rejecting it. Specifically, the customer forwarded the
> following from their maillog...
>
> Oct 17 11:49:20 hostname sendmail[1374]: _msg_id_: telecorp1.domain.com
> [X.X.X.X] (may be forged) did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during
> connection to MTA

This error message does not indicate that sendmail rejected anything.

> Well, obviously this problem can be solved two ways, by me changing how
> blat communicates with the SMTP server or by them changing a
> configuration in sendmail (if that's possible). Can anyone give me
> additional clues as to what's going on, what I would have to ask them
> to modify in their sendmail?

What is going on is that Blat connected to sendmail, but didn't really do
anything. Period.

Now, it's possible that Blat attempted to send E-mail by making another
connection (either before or after this one) and sendmail rejected it, in
which case you would have another error message in the logs on the server.

If there are no other messages logged, it means that Blat connected, and
crashed immediately, thus closing the connection.

In that case, there's very little that can be modified in sendmail in order
to fix some indeterminate bug in a broken DLL.



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=Yf4x
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--=_mimegpg-commodore.email-scan.com-7893-1131061909-0006--

Re: Sendmail rejecting Blat generated email

Can't answer your question, but will ask one of my own :-)

I'm really keen to use Blat, but I'm really unhappy with its error
handling. It seems to me, that there is no way you can give end-users a
reasonable error message. For example, error code 2 means that the
server was down or the address was malformed or the file didn't exist
or the time is after 4pm or your brother's hat was on the wrong peg ...
you get what I mean.

How do you plan to handle errors & advise the users?

TIA,
TC