Mail sent repeatedly to the receiver
 

Hi

A user from our domain sent an email with big attachments to a recepient of other domain, and the same email was sent several times to the receiver.

I checked the df and qf file on our sendmail server, in /var/spool/mqueue and found following:

qfo5SHgJqX006403:Mreply: read error from remote-host.somedomain.com.
qfo5SHgJqX006403:MDeferred: Connection timed out with remote-host.somedomain.com.

I deleted all qf and df files for this particular mail. So deleting the df and qf file has stopped sending mails repeatedly to the receiver.

Is this problem at our end or the receipient end?
Why is the same mail sent several times to the receiver?

Thanks.

This is normal behavior on the part of your server. Email tries and tries again until either the mail goes through or your server figures it never will go through. The receiving server probably has a size limit on emails that it will accept. Try having your user send an email with a small attachment to see if that works. If it does try compressing the attachments or contact the servers admin to see if the size limit can be increased.

Based only on the information provided, here are some questions that need to be answered to fully explore the issue.

1. Was the message received in it's entirety?

2. Can we see the entire log for these messages?

3. Can we get copies of the headers of the messages as received by the other party? This may shed some light on the system(s) that the message passed through

4. Looking at the original (unsent) message file would be prudent as well as it could show a formatting error.

Looks like depending on your version of sendmail there may be a problem on your end. Check out this link, it is from IBM and 2006 but without knowing your versions . . . might apply:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docvie...id=isg1PK19612

It appears the other system is accepting the message as complete but your sendmail box is not receiving a "Sent Successfully" message. If the message is not successfully received by the other system it should be dropped and not delivered. So this is not correct behavior, I am just not sure if the receiving server is not sending a 'message received' or the sending server isn't receiving it.