>>>>> "Philip" == Philip Hazel <ph10@???> writes:
Philip> On Sat, 15 Jan 2000, Liam Healy wrote:
>> By looking at system logs (perro/tcp.log and daemon.log) I can tell
>> that there have been two computers connecting to my computer on the
>> SMTP port, every 16 min or half an hour, round the clock, for the last
>> several days. No mail appears to be processed; nothing appears in the
>> exim logs, even with log_level=6. Other mail is delivered normally,
>> even other messages from the same computers, and logged as I would
>> expect.
>>
>> I'm stumped trying to find it out why no messages get through, How can
>> I tell _exactly_ what is going on when the remote hosts open port 25?
Philip> Is there nothing in the Exim rejectlog either?
Philip> Try setting log_smtp_connections.
>> I am using Exim 2.05 in Debian 2.1.
Philip> In that case, try smtp_log_connections - in that release the option had
Philip> the wrong name; it got corrected shortly afterwards.
1) I solved the problem. Eventually (5 days), the remote hosts timed
out. One of them was a computer at a different site that I use; the
message is one I had sent, so I got a bounce message
>>> RCPT To:<alias@???>
<<< 451 Cannot check <alias@???> at this time - please try l
ater
alias@???... Deferred: 451 Cannot check <alias@???
gton.dc.us> at this time - please try later
Message could not be delivered for 5 days
Message will be deleted from queue
Since this was addressed to an alias, I checked /etc/aliases, and
experimented sending mail (with mail -v) from the remote host. I
found out this suprising fact: if there is a comment on the line
following the alias that does not start in the first column, all mail
to that alias bounces with the above message. E.g.:
# here is a comment, this is OK
alias1 : realname
# This comment is OK too
alias2 : realname
# This comment will cause mail to alias2 to bounce
alias3 : realname
# alias3 will be OK.
Is it possible to make exim less sensitive to the form of
/etc/aliases?
2) Although it didn't play a role in the solution of the problem, I
did add the smtp_log_connections (= log_smtp_connections). Prior to
doing this, there was nothing in any log, including the rejectlog.
When I added this, the only new thing for bounced messages was the
following in mainlog
2000-01-17 18:47:06 SMTP connection from ursa.cus.cam.ac.uk [131.111.8.6]
2000-01-17 18:47:07 SMTP connection from ursa.cus.cam.ac.uk [131.111.8.6] closed
by QUIT
This says something, but not a whole lot. Is there a way to log extra
information, e.g. the addressee, sender, status (successfully received
or bounced) and if bounced, what the message is?
Thanks for your help.
Liam
