On Fri, 18 Aug 2000, Don Smith wrote:
> > Ultimately, you can use one of the tools to look at the packets on the
> > wire. There seems to be such a tool for most operating systems, but I
> > can never remember the names of them, I'm afraid. That way, you will see
> > *exactly* what is in the packets Exim sends, and exactly what the
> > responses are.
> >
>
> I'm a relative novice at this level of detail, can someone provide some
> user-friendly pointers and/or instructions?
[There is some problem with your user agent. You are sending me and the
mailing list separate copies *without the full recipients list in the
headers*. Thus, if I reply to the personal copy, it doesn't go to the
list as well. I've just noticed this. I don't think the list saw my
previous response.]
> When I asked, I originally had in mind something like an interactive
> command-line session where one could send a line, get a response, and so on.
> Is this possible? If so, what would a basic set of commands be for, say, a
> one-line body test message?
You can use telnet to experiment with SMTP. See examples in RFC 821.
> The puzzling thing is that the header is received and passed on by the
> remote host, so the connection is established OK (refer back to the debug
> output from my first post), it just seems to fail with the sending of the
> body of the message.
The failure appears to be *after* the entire message has been sent. I
doubt whether an interactive telnet session will show you anything new,
which is why I suggested you'd have to look at the stuff on the wire. In
Solaris there's a command called snoop that does this, but I don't know
the equivalent on other systems.
Mind you, you might not learn anything. You might still see "message is
sent, remote host drops connection". That doesn't tell you anything new.
Have you tried asking the postmaster at your ISP if their logs show any
reason why this is happening?
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
