UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,
We use metasend to send e-mail from our app. This works fine with most kinds of mail, for example plain text, HTML with images and mail with attachments.
But we still have one problem: If the to-address is misspelled, then still everything seems to be fine. We don't get any message back saying that the mail couldn't be delivired.

Any ideas?

Sturla

It could be that your servers use one central mail server to send email out and that all other servers are set up to send only. This would be done for security reasons.

If an email sent from user joe from System A goes to user jack -> on system B it may actually go to system E first as a central Email server. Then system E sends it on to system B. B rejects it due to a bad "To:" address and system E tries unsuccessfully to send it back to system A. System A rejects it and system E should then send it to whoever gets Postmaster mail.

A -> jack@B.us.com -> E -> jack@b.us.com <-> B (rejects back - no such user)
E -> joe@A.us.com <-> A (rejects - does not accept email)
E -> postmaster@E.us.com (mail undeliverable)

This may be what you are seeing - and then again, maybe not.
HTH

To track this down you will need to see how your local sendmail (or other mta) is setting up the envelope "from" address. Try sending mail to a non-existent local user. If you don't get back an error message with that, you know that the problem is on the local system. If that worked, try a non-existent user on the next hop. And so on. Once you know which system has the problem, check the logs on that system to see what happened.

And be sure that you don't have a "Errors-To:" line in the header. If you do, it will override the envelope "from" address.

Ok, no message back even if message goes to non-existent local user, so maybe its a local problem.
But there is one strange thing. If I use mailx instead of metasend, I always get a message back.
So why don't I just use mailx? Well, I have a problem with all this MIME stuff. I got it to work with attachments, but HTML with "embedded" images...

Sturla

The problem is certainly local and you are really pointing the finger at this metasend tool. Somehow it is either inserting a bogus "Errors-To:" line in the header or it's messing up the envelope sender. The log files on your local system should tell what happened. But fixing it may be hard. What language is matasend written in? Do you have source?

You might want to try this script.