[ILUG] SMTP oddity

[Michael Conry]

On 6/23/05, Niall O Broin <niall at linux.ie> wrote:
<snip>
> the delayed
> mail has two Received lines from the same stage of the process, i.e.
> Received by server B from server A   and these two lines have times ~10
> hours apart.
> 
> The email which arrived promptly had 3 Received; headers - the delayed
> one had  4, the additional one being the extra one mentioned above. The
> odd tow headers are like this:
> 
> Received: from anchor-post-36.mail.demon.net [194.217.242.86] (HELO
> c1m11.emaildefenseservice.com)
>         by c1m11.emaildefenseservice.com (mxl_mta-1.3.8-10p6) with SMTP id
> 22d99b24.3641.199.c1m11;
>         Wed, 22 Jun 2005 13:17:22 -0400 (EDT)
> Received: from anchor-post-36.mail.demon.net [194.217.242.86] (EHLO
> anchor-post-36.mail.demon.net)
>         by c1m11.emaildefenseservice.com (mxl_mta-1.3.8-10p6) with ESMTP id
> 8d219b24.2860.173.c1m11;
>         Wed, 22 Jun 2005 03:27:20 -0400 (EDT)

> Any ideas ?
> 
Maybe you spotted this already, but since you didn't mention it in the
mail I'll note it here: the first header is an EHLO/ESMTP header, the
later one is HELO/SMTP.

Perhaps the system fell back to smtp after encountering problems with
esmtp.  I wouldn't expect two headers though, and doesn't explain how
the second mail came through in double-quick time. Maybe it's useful
to know which header the more successful mail acquired (and was it
fractionally before or after this problematic mail).

Michael