Dear List-Users,

since 4 month we try to get help from Ipswitch with
no effort. Therefore we decide to post the problem to
this list. Maybe some of you know the bug an can help.

We use Imail 6.05 with all hotfixes installed.
The server is equiped with a PIII 700Mhz, running
Windows NT 4.0 Server SP6a (german version) and
has a total of 384MB Ram (3x 128MB sticks). 2
nic cards are installed (one internal ip, one
external ip - imail registry is checked to use
the external card only). No IIS is installed only
Norton Antivirus Autoprotect is sitting there
waiting to kill any virus ;-)

Imail is configured with one IP address. A total
of 2000 users on 980 domains are setup on the
system. DNS for each domain is setup this way:
subdomain mail points to the server ip address
mx record points to mail.domainname.

Each domain is setup as a virtual host ($virtualXXX)
in Imail named with the domainname and
mail.domainname as alias.

Smtp security ist set to "relay mail for" our 6x /24
(6x class-c) subnet and 2 external ip�s for users
using etrn command (we do a store-and-forward for
them). SMTP AUTH command is enabled, SMTP VRFY is
enabled, CHECK VALOID USER is enabled, AUTO DENY
POSSIBLE HACK is enabled.

Due to this settings users outside from our ip range
have to use SMTP AUTHENTICATION to send email thru
our mailserver. Depending on what email client they
have the use user@domainname oder user%domainname or
user%domainname@domainname.

So far everything is setup correct and the mailserver
is working fine. Now the problem.

Suddenly the SMTP AUTHENTICATION process stops and
no user can send emails anymore by providing his
username. The Imail logfiles show an "invalid user
destination address" (e.g. i try to send an email to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] imail will tell me "invalid user
[EMAIL PROTECTED]"). Sending emails form a server within
our ip range (remember the "relay mail for" settings)
still works. Therefore it is not the smtp process itself
which does not work anymore it is only the SMTP
AUTHENTICATION which stops. Restarting the smtp service
solves the problem until the authentication stops
again.

There is no error message in the logs (except the
on above), no entrys in the event log of NT, no
Dr. Watson error - everything seems to work, but
it does not.

This happens only on servers with 1 ip address. Other
servers with multiple ip�s do not have this problem.

What have we done to solve the probelm?
1. played arround with registry settings
2. disabling SMTP AUTH / SMTP VRFY
3. killed all mails older 10 days (assuming there could be a damaged email)
4. uninstalled Norton Antivirus
5. opend troubleticket with Ipswitch
6. several calls to Ipswitch support (thanks Tanja)
The bug still exists.

What we think could cause the problem
1. a bad username e.g. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?
2. a password like df*+~12 ?
3. a stack overflow due to wrong authentication?
4. an email client with malformed protocols (the bat)?
5. running store-and-forward on a single ip server?

At the moment we have a workarround by stopping and
starting the "IMAIL SMTP SERVER" every 15 minutes
with a cron job (cron-it for NT). As you might imagin
this is a very poor solution because customers
loose emails every 15 minutes (at least that one
beeing processed at the moment of stopping the service).

Has anyone any idea where the problem could be located?
Has anyone a solution for the problem?
Ipswitch tells us they are working on a patch, but
at the same time they tell us they do not know what
the problem cause (so how can they work on a patch?).

Any help, ideas or recomendations are welcome
we realy do not know what to do next.

BTW. this problem exists since Imail 5.0.

Best regards

Michael Weichselgartner
WebControl GmbH



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