syn uw <syn_uw@hotmail.com> wrote:
> One of our subscribed users (to our mailing list) cannot receive any mails
> posted to our mailing list. When sending out a mail we receive a "Delivery
> Status Notification (Failure)" from their mail server. This is the error
> message:
>
> ---
> This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
>
> Unable to deliver message to the following recipients, because the message
> was forwarded more than the maximum allowed times. This could indicate a
> mail loop.
>
> Final-Recipient: rfc822;emailaddress@here.com
> Action: failed
> Status: 4.4.6
> ---
>
> Is that because their mail server may not like majordomo ? Or what could be
> the problem here ?
The problem is that by the time the message reaches the subscriber's
mail server, the message has accumulated a lot of 'Received' headers.
(It gets one more each time a mail server forwards the message, both on
its way to your list server and again on its way from your server to
the subscriber.) Based on the number of headers, this mail server
thinks that the message might just be going around in circles so it
bounces the message back to you.
> Is out a problem on our side (the mailing list side) or
> is it a problem on their mail server ?
It's just a consequence of a long mail path.
If the number of 'Received' headers is small (say, less than a dozen)
then you might be able to persuade the operators of the subscriber's
mailserver to reconfigure their mailserver and raise the threshhold
that they're using to make this decision.
If there really are a lot of headers on the bounced message then you
might find that a lot of sites start bouncing your messages, and they
might not all be willing to raise their limits to accommodate your list
traffic. In that case you could turn on Majordomo's 'purge_received'
configuration switch for this list (it's in the list.config file). This
will tell the Majordomo 'resend' script to discard any Received headers
from the incoming message before distributing the message to the list,
so the total number of headers on the message will be reduced and the
message has a better chance of getting through.
The downside to 'purge_received' is that it throws away information
that would be useful if you ever needed to track down forged messages
or mail delays. If that's likely to be an issue then you could
consider logging the complete inbound messages to a file as well as
feeding them to Majordomo. (My locally-hacked solution to this is to
convert inbound Received headers to X-Original-Received headers and
leave them on the message.)
Mike.
--
mike.oliver@sun.com
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