Screwed mail servers

[Damien Elmes]

jeremy at itassist.net.au writes:

> I've been trying to mail a few people for various reasons and I've been
> getting some curious errors.
> 
> I haven't mailed these people/companies before, but when I tried exim
> kept returning erros claiming that the peer timed out or closed the
> connection.  Sometimes it happens during the data command (timeout after
> block) but most often when exim says 'finished data, waiting for
> confirmation' - or whatever the message is.
> 
> Anyone else had these problems?  I have a pretty good idea who to blame,
> but most of these incidents occurred with companies who wouldn't tell me
> what servers they were running, just that they 'handled hundreds of
> thousands of emails without trouble'.  (Hays IT idiot tech support)
> 
> I'm almost tempted to start a 'email servers hall of shame' for servers
> so badly configured they aren't RFC compliant any more.

I've heard a number of reports in the industry that Hotmail has been
dropping connections or taking exorbitant amounts of time to process
incoming and outgoing mail. At a bunch of identical servers we have at
work, one server has recently experienced numerous problems with
connections to Hotmail timing out. (some poking around indicates the
server's IP hasn't been blocked or filtered).

If anyone knows what's been happening to some of the e-mail on the net
recently, I'd be most interested.

Cheers!

-- 
Damien Elmes
resolve at repose.cx