Hi
On my servers, I noticed increasing number of failed deliveries with
417 Temporary delivery error and Error connecting to remote
address. I did a little investigation and long story short, XMail
doesn't handle address family fallback, when connection using
preferred one does not succeed. It simply tries only one address per
MX and if it doesn't work, it considers that MX dead and moves to another one.
Now imagine what happens when you use -M7 parameter (use IPV6 records
if present, or IPV4 records otherwise, for host name lookups), target
system has both IPv4 and IPv6 records set for all MXes (soon to be
standard for most servers, well perhaps not so soon, but it's getting
more and more common) and IPv6 is broken on either side or anywhere
between. XMail tries connecting using only IPv6 for a while, until it
finally gives up and returns the message as undeliverable. Which is
wrong, because if it tried IPv4, it would deliver it just fine.
Relatively safe workaround for now, assuming IPv6 as a new thing is
going to break more often than IPv4, is to use -M5 instead (Use IPV4
records if present, or IPV6 records otherwise, for host name
lookups). But it means that IPv6 won't get used at all, except for
few rare IPv6-only MXes. Also the problem does not really go away, if
it happens that IPv6 works while IPv4 does not, it will be back.
Attached is patch with works for me solution, i.e. not tested by
anyone else nor even necessarily correct. It makes XMail try to
connect to all addresses of MX before moving to next one. Apart from
possible unintentional errors, it deliberately ignores -M5 and -M7
parameters and uses AF_UNSPEC for getaddrinfo() and all results when
one of them is set. It respects -M4 and -M6 if someone really wants
to use only one address family.
IMHO -M5 and -M7 are wrong, at least on Windows, where getaddrinfo()
with AF_UNSPEC returns addresses in best order automatically and
manual override should not be needed. I think Linux either does that
too or at least has means to influence it using /etc/gai.conf. So
even if -M5 and -M7 should stay as useful for someone, adding new -M8
for AF_UNSPEC order would be good idea.
PSYNC has the same problem. And I guess CtrlClnt connecting to server
probably too, but it's far from critical.
- xmail-1.27-clean\SMTPUtils.cpp 2010-02-26 04:33:44.0 +0100
+++ xmail-1.27-af-fix\SMTPUtils.cpp 2013-02-10 16:03:44.882282400 +0100
@@ -1212,30 +1212,71 @@
SYS_INET_ADDR SvrAddr;
- if (MscGetServerAddress(szAddress, SvrAddr, iPortNo) 0)
+ int iError;
+ struct addrinfo *pCRes, *pRes;
+ struct addrinfo AHints;
+ bool bConnected = false;
+ SYS_SOCKET SockFD;
+
+ ZeroData(AHints);
+ switch (iAddrFamily) {
+ case AF_INET:
+ AHints.ai_family = AF_INET;
+ break;
+ case AF_INET6:
+ AHints.ai_family = AF_INET6;
+ break;
+ default:
+ AHints.ai_family = AF_UNSPEC;
+ }
+
+ if ((iError = getaddrinfo(szAddress, NULL, AHints, pRes)) != 0) {
return INVALID_SMTPCH_HANDLE;
+ }
+ for (pCRes = pRes, iError = ERR_BAD_SERVER_ADDR; pCRes != NULL; pCRes =
pCRes-ai_next) {
+ if (pCRes-ai_addr-sa_family != AF_INET
pCRes-ai_addr-sa_family != AF_INET6)
+ continue;
- SYS_SOCKET SockFD = SysCreateSocket(SysGetAddrFamily(SvrAddr),
SOCK_STREAM, 0);
+ if (pCRes != NULL sizeof(SvrAddr.Addr) = pCRes-ai_addrlen)
{
+ ZeroData(SvrAddr);
+ SvrAddr.iSize = pCRes-ai_addrlen;
+ memcpy(SvrAddr.Addr, pCRes-ai_addr, pCRes-ai_addrlen);
+ } else
+ continue;
- if (SockFD == SYS_INVALID_SOCKET)
- return INVALID_SMTPCH_HANDLE;
+ if (SysSetAddrPort(SvrAddr, iPortNo) 0)
+ continue;
- /*
-* Are we requested to bind to a specific interface to talk to this
server?
-*/
- if (pGw-pszIFace != NULL) {
- SYS_INET_ADDR BndAddr;
+ SockFD = SysCreateSocket(SysGetAddrFamily(SvrAddr),
SOCK_STREAM, 0);
- if (MscGetServerAddress(pGw-pszIFace, BndAddr, 0) 0 ||
- SysBindSocket(SockFD, BndAddr) 0) {
+ if (SockFD == SYS_INVALID_SOCKET)
+ continue;
+
+ /*
+* Are we requested to bind to a specific interface to talk to
this server?
+*/
+ if (pGw-pszIFace != NULL) {
+ SYS_INET_ADDR BndAddr;
+
+ if (MscGetServerAddress(pGw-pszIFace, BndAddr, 0) 0
||
+ SysBindSocket(SockFD, BndAddr) 0) {
+ SysCloseSocket(SockFD);
+ continue;
+ }
+
