Mail Problem: retry timeout exceeded

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Posted by embsupafly, 04-24-2006, 12:51 PM
I have a customer that sent me an email stating that the forwarder he had setup on his domain is not sending mail to the address that it is supposed to forward to and he sent me the error message he got in his inbox: customers-isp-account-where-mail-sho...@sbcglobal.com (ultimately generated from forwarder@customers-domain-on-server.com) retry timeout exceeded The exim logs show the same thing. I ran: host sbcglobal.com in the shell and I do get a response, so the route looks ok. Is this a problem on our end or sbcglobal.com's end?
Posted by embsupafly, 04-24-2006, 02:06 PM
Now we are getting this message: retry time not reached for any host after a long failure period Any Ideas??????
Posted by embsupafly, 04-25-2006, 12:11 PM
Anyone????
Posted by InstaCarma_Rose, 04-25-2006, 12:23 PM
Can you paste the error that shows up the in the exim mail log when the mail server tries to deliver the email to this remote server. You can see the logs by tailing the mail log using the commandline "tail -f /var/log/exim_mainlog". This will give a clear indication as to the exact cause of the problem.
Posted by SPaReK, 04-25-2006, 12:24 PM
From the shell of your server try doing the following: This will show you the MX records for sbcglobal.com, what servers mail would go to for this domain. It may show the IPs of these mail servers (if there are multiple MX records listed, just pick one). If it doesn't, perform a DNS lookup on that MX record Actually, when I did an MX lookup on sbcglobal.com, I didn't get anything back. Perhaps they are not using MX records. I believe if no MX records are listed, then mail servers will go to a domain's A record and attempt to use that to send mail to, so just do a: which should give you an IP address that sbcglobal.com resolves to, again if multiple ones are listed (I see two), just pick one. If you feel frisky, you can perform this for each IP address listed. Once you have the IP address, connect to it on port 25: You should get connected to their mail server, you'll probably see an introduction banner, now introduce yourself: where is the name of your server. Now issue the following commands: Notice that the e-mail addresses in mail from and rcpt to should be enclosed in <'s and >'s. Some mail servers will work without these, some won't. I believe its proper standard to include these, but someone can correct me if I'm wrong. Also, its important that postmaster@ represent a real e-mail address. I just made this one up, since you should have this set up on your server, but if you don't any e-mail address will work. Also notice the blank line after Subject and Test Message. This empty line is necessary to signal, this is the end of the headers, the message follows. The period on its own line tells the server that the message is done and quit just disconnects you from their mail server. That message should go through without any problems. If you see any errors in a certain step, then it may lead you to where the issue is. Hope this helps.
Posted by embsupafly, 04-26-2006, 01:25 PM
Found 2 addresses for sbcglobal.com 144.160.134.61 144.160.103.79 Cant telnet into either one of them: telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection timed out Can't ping sbcglobal.com either Can't ping or telnet to it from my workstation either which is on a completely different network from our server (even a different state) Can anyone ping or telnet into the above ips? Also did a port scan on sbcglobal.com Interesting ports on sbc.com (144.160.134.61): (The 1599 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered) Port State Service 80/tcp open http 443/tcp open https No exact OS matches for host (test conditions non-ideal). TCP/IP fingerprint: SInfo(V=3.00%P=i386-redhat-linux-gnu%D=4/26%Time=444FADE5%O=80%C=-1) TSeq(Class=RI%gcd=1%SI=3922%IPID=Z%TS=U) TSeq(Class=RI%gcd=1%SI=76FC%IPID=Z%TS=U) TSeq(Class=RI%gcd=1%SI=3FB2%IPID=Z%TS=U) T1(Resp=Y%DF=N%W=223F%ACK=S++%Flags=AS%Ops=M) T2(Resp=N) T3(Resp=N) T4(Resp=N) T5(Resp=N) T6(Resp=N) T7(Resp=N) PU(Resp=N) Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 322 seconds What is all the TSeq and T1-Tn? Last edited by embsupafly; 04-26-2006 at 01:35 PM.
Posted by SPaReK, 04-26-2006, 01:43 PM
It looks like this may be an issue with sbcglobal.com. I would try contacting them directly. I'm not sure if they have a contact form or link on their website or how you would go about contacting them, but it does not look like the domain, sbcglobal.com is allowing e-mail.
Posted by ivanoats, 07-06-2009, 06:06 PM
awesome tip, was glad I found this. I checked the exim_mainlog (grep'ing for the user's email address) and saw that it was a permission problem with the user's maildir.

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