by I have a very intermittent problem with my system. It's running
OSR5.0.0, with rs500d, net100, and supplements 409, 414, 416, 422,
430, 434, 436, and 437 applied (hrmph ... customquery listpatches'
output is a bit hard to sift through at times, but I think that
list is accurate).
I'm one of the few people who actually composes their email on this
box; most send email via SMTP (either through gateways to mail
systems like Notes, or with Netscape/Eudora/etc.) and as far as I
know I'm the only one who gets this problem.
Three times in the last month and a half, mail I've sent has
bounced:
-------------------8<---------(cut here)-------->8--------------------
From mmdf Wed Nov 27 17:01:52 1996
Subject: Failed mail
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 96 17:00:54 EST
Status: RO
Trouble sending mail on united.ussinc.com:
============ Transcript follows ============
Initialization reply failure
============== Message follows =============
[message body deleted]
-------------------8<---------(cut here)-------->8--------------------
It happens so infrequently that I'm not sure if this is a
valid pattern or just statistical noise, but each of the three
times it's happened, I've been sending mail to the same person.
I have an alias in my .mailrc for her. The alias is
expanded correctly (because the correct address appears in the
bounced message). I send a lot of email to her (as many
as a few dozen messages a day). When the destination site is
down, I know that MMDF queues it up and retries it until it
goes through; I've seen that happen a few times. So I don't
think that this message indicates that there was a problem in
contacting the destination site.
The really odd part, and this may also be coincidence, is that
all three times it's happened, I've been sending new mail rather
than hitting 'r' to reply to a previous message.
The Date: line above is two seconds later than the Date: line
on the original message which bounced. The actual time of delivery
of the bounce message into my mailbox is sixty seconds after
the original message. I don't know if either of these times are
significant.
I looked at the TAs, but searching for this message returns
nothing. The generic TA on solving MMDF problems says to look
through the logs; I have logging set to BST for channels and
messages, and when I looked, there was nothing logged at the
time I sent this message. Since it only shows up every couple of
weeks, cranking logging up to the top isn't practical ...
Any ideas? So long as it only ever happens to me, it's a
minor annoyance, but there are 70 or 80 other people using this
system for their email and I want to make sure they're not going
to get hit with it.
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Manager, Technical Services United System Solutions Inc.
104 Carnforth Road, Toronto, ON, Canada M4A 2K7 (416) 750-7946 x251