Re: [Exim] Double Delivery

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Author: Mark Hynes
Date:  
To: Ron McKeating
CC: Exim-Users (E-mail)
Subject: Re: [Exim] Double Delivery
On Mar 04, Ron McKeating wrote:
> Exim is innocent in this but was being blamed. Just wondered if any of
> you know of this problem, Here goes
>
> A user of ours claimed we were delivering his email twice to all the
> recipients, both local and off campus. This did not happen all the time.
> I got him to tell a recipient to save both copies and had a look at the
> headers. The first copy was fine delivered by us. The second copy had a
> helo from some remote machine. After going though the headers it appears
> that one of the recipients was using Microsoft SMTPSVC and instead of
> just delivering to the user on that machine took it into its tiny little
> head to deliver to everybody else in the To: line. So all recipients got
> one genuine copy from our mail server (exim), and then a second copy
> from the rogue microsoft machine.


I think it's probably the "Microsoft Connector for POP3 Mailboxes" at
'fault' here (or people attempting to run mail for a whole domain through
a single cheap POP3 account, really. Odds are that rack1.i-a.co.uk just
has *@tmat.com aliased to industrial.tmat@???, and they pick up
from POP3 from there, and the 'connector' inserts the message into their
server.

These 'POP3 Connector' things seem to be a notoriously bad idea - in the
absence of any useful/sane way of determining what address(es) might have
been in the envelope they get configured to work on To: and Cc: lines etc,
with predictable end results like you've seen.

At worst they decide they don't want a 'recipient' for some reason and
send it right back to you in a loop, which might have happened here.

And of course it'll be your Exim's fault - there can't be anything wrong
or flawed about their software or setup. *sigh*


--
| Mark Hynes           mark.hynes@??? |
| Service Developer   http://www.uk.easynet.net/ |
| Easynet Ltd   --   a part of Easynet Group plc |