For the past few months, a user at my company has reported difficulties receiving mail sent from a particular educational institution. After examining the problem and getting some help from someone on the technical staff there, I think I've found what's going on. But I wonder if anyone has any additional insights or suggestions.
The problem occurs when the person sending the mail has an email address where the domain portion lacks an MX record. The domain portion does have a valid A record, though. During the SMTP transaction, SIMS was taking approximately 58 seconds to reply to the MAIL FROM command. E.g.,
A BROKEN domain then. MX records are not, iirc, optional for any domain sending/receiving mail.
However, by the time SIMS had responded, the remote server had timed out the connection:
the remote server is broken twice (time out under 60 seconds is just wrong)
1. Get bigschool.edu to increase its timeouts if possible.
This should be done anyway.
1a. Get bigschool.edu to create MX records for its various departmental mailservers. Would work, but may be asking too much.
People who can't manage correct DNS don't deserve to send/receive email.
1) Any problems with my analysis?
2) Is bigschool.edu's timeout on their outbound SMTP sessions unreasonably short?
Yes.
-- A vote for Nader is a vote for George Bush.
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