Sendmail (Deferred: Operation timed out...)

[Nils Vogels]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
 
Hi Nicholas,

Nicholas Henry wrote:

>When sending messages out they are left in the mqueue directory. Examining
>the contents for files I find this error:
>
>Deferred: Operation timed out with mx3.megamailservers.com.


This could be caused by a few things.

First of all: I am assuming that "mx3.megamailservers.com" is not the
mailserver of your ISP that you are using to have sendmail send mail
through. I am assuming that this is a mailserver that needs to be
contacted because there is a subscribed user from that domain in your
mailinglists.

Reason 1: The remote mailserver could have been busy or offline at the
moment that your sendmail tried to forward the mail. No biggie, this
happens. Everyone has to reboot every once in a while, every
mailserver gets hammered with spam every once in a while.

Reason 2: The internet was experiencing trouble connecting your
mailserver to mx3.megamailservers.com. To check if this still is
occuring, you could launch a telnet to mx3.megamailservers.com on port
25 (the default SMTP port).

If everything is OK, the remote mailserver should greet you like this:

220 mail23.megamailservers.com ESMTP Sendmail 8.13.1/8.13.1; Fri, 3
Jun 2005 14:30:53 -0400

If there still is some error, check your firewall, see if your ISP is
blocking direct SMTP connections (some do..)

If there still is an error after that, something could be wrong in
your setup. Check /var/log/maillog for clues !

Greetings,

Nils
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
 
iD4DBQFCoKN1MzNX/a06Wq0RAjY4AJdXU4KbgrqGSr4tSRFKZc1Q9/1+AJ9K64Uc
ncQLap+LdMT5zA0turiyWQ==
=q5CQ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----