[TAG] Undeliverable Mail

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 02:17:06PM -0400, Claude S. Sutton wrote:
> Since I broke mutt, this is a fresh start on the subject without any 
> copied text, so I may miss a few points.
> 
> I sent that reject with all of the headers because at one point Rick 
> asked for it.

Rick offered to look at your headers once - and had done so. I don't
recall him offering to look at every failure message you got from then
on.
 
> As for my not being able to read and understand, a couple of points.
> 
> I know exactly what the 550 said.  It said suttonmachine.com does not exist.
> 
> Limited as my knowledge is, I can do a whosis on suttonmachine.com and get:
> 
> host suttonmachine.com suttonmachine.com has address 198.70.140.200 
> suttonmachine.com mail is handled by 10 hermes.ncaccess.net. 
> suttonmachine.com mail is handled by 20 triton.ncaccess.net.
> 
> 
> As you know, that can be pursued to the point that we get phone numbers 
> and post office boxes.  And the name of the tech administrator.

Whether the domain *exists* was not the question; whether that domain's
listed mailservers accept mail for it is. The answer, as demonstrated by
my copy-and-pasted SMTP conversation with the mailserver, is that they
do not.
 
> So my question really was:  If that is the case, is my machine doing 
> something to that address to mangle it so that Rick's machine is looking 
> at something other than suttonmachine.com?

The problem is that the address you're trying to send mail to is not
acknowledged as valid by that domain's server.
 
> Or is it possible that Rick's system is too picky and rejecting 
> something it should not be?
> 
> Neil Youngman posted this, to which no one replied:
> 
> ;; QUESTION SECTION:
> ;suttonmachine.com.             IN      MX
> 
> ;; ANSWER SECTION:
> suttonmachine.com.      86400   IN      MX      20 triton.ncaccess.net.
> suttonmachine.com.      86400   IN      MX      10 hermes.ncaccess.net.
> 
> ;; Query time: 149 msec
> ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1)
> ;; WHEN: Wed Aug 16 07:52:50 2006
> ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 93

There's nothing to reply to here: Neil ran 'dig', it showed the results
in the domain name database. These are fine and look correct - but
they're not pertinent to the problem you're having.
 
> So although I confess that I am not as smart as you guys are, I have 
> thus far given you credit for being smarter than you are.

Since you are, by your admission, not as smart as "we guys" are, is
there a reason for us to consider your assessment as anything other than
laughable, either now or previously?

You were given some very high-quality advice; when you started taking it
for granted and ignoring it, things stopped working for you, so you
decided to start complaining instead of following the advice to correct
your behavior. Well, congratulations: your whining and your lack of
politeness mean that you've just lost all access to my help, for one.
Care to try for the next prize?

>  Really smart 
> people recognize that even us dumb guys sometimes have a reason for our 
> questions even if we don't communicate those reasons as well as we should.

[shrug] Your reasons are based in ignorance. You were given advice based
on knowledge. You decided that your reasons were more important; I wish
you the joy of them, and the experience of using them to make your
computer work.
 
> With that, I am going to give you guys a rest and struggle through it.

Have a nice day.


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://linuxgazette.net *