csuite and multiple emails

Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 11:42:29 -0300 (ADT)
From: Michael Smith <michael@csuite.ns.ca>
To: don.mackill@iname.com
cc: csuite-tech@chebucto.ns.ca
Precedence: bulk
Return-Path: <csuite-tech-mml-owner@chebucto.ns.ca>

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<cranky=off> (ok, now I've got some sleep behind me ;)

On Thu, 1 Jul 1999 don.mackill@iname.com wrote:

> Dave Wile forwarded a message to me subjected, "How zmailer does its
> thing..." that he received from you in response to his question.  Maybe I am
> missing something but I can't find a solution to our problem from that
> posting.  Is there anything else you can do for us?

Last Saturday I sent a message to root@cobequidnet.ns.ca with instructions
for fixing this problem. Here it is:

Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 17:06:33 -0300 (ADT)
From: Michael Smith <michael@csuite.ns.ca>
To: root@cnet.windsor.ns.ca, root@pgfn.bc.ca, root@cobequidnet.ns.ca
cc: root@chebucto.ns.ca
Subject: IMPORTANT: ZMailer smtpserver bug

I found messages destined for the following hosts in our queue:

wwhcn.cnet.windsor.ns.ca
strider.pgfn.bc.ca
cobequidnet.ns.ca

Mostly people who are on Chebucto mailing lists, and probably getting
hammered by mail from our system. We upgraded our ZMailer yesterday to the
latest minor release, which exposes a CHUNKING bug in the version you're
all running, 2.99.48. Instructions for the workaround are below.

I'm sending this from my home system, so you won't get 400 copies of this
;)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 16:53:55 -0300 (ADT)
From: Michael Smith <michael@csuite.ns.ca>
To: Ryan Alexander Neily <aa033@wwhcn.cnet.windsor.ns.ca>
Cc: team tech <techteam@chebucto.ns.ca>
Subject: Re: your mail

On Sat, 26 Jun 1999, Ryan Alexander Neily wrote:

>    As an onlooker from Windsor WHCN cnet, I am just mentioning that I 
> have received about 400 emails today. This maybe has something to do
with 
> the zmailer upgrade? I'm not complaining, mind you, as I suppose you are 
> having enough difficulties. Good luck,

There's a bug in the smtpserver for your version of ZMailer. We had this
problem one of our own machines a couple weeks back.

Your smtpserver is sending CHUNKING in its greeting code. CHUNKING is a
feature of ESMTP for sending messages faster, but it's broken in your
version of smtpserver. The way it's broken happens to make new ZMailers
think it's hanging up on them and not receiving the messages, so they get
retried over and over again.

The work around is to kill the smtpserver
(/var/csuite/etc/mail/bin/zmailer kill smtpserver)
then edit the smtpserver binary in binary mode
(vi -b /var/csuite/etc/mail/bin/smtpserver)
then search for CHUNKING
(<forward slash>CHUNKING<ENTER>)
then replace the C with an X
(rX<ESCAPE>)
then save & quit
(ZZ)
then restart smtpserver.
(/var/csuite/etc/mail/bin/zmailer smtpserver

Michael

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