Last week we experienced a problem where mails being sent to MOBILEEMAIL.VODAFONE.NET were stuck in the mail.box and “Domino server fails message transfer with 'SMTP Protocol returned a transient error” being reported in the Notes Log. During this period emails addressed internet domains were being delivered successfully.
After investigating the error message I was under the impression this was either a DNS/Network problem with our ISP and/or a problem with MOBILEEMAIL.VODAFONE.NET rather than Domino.
However, I decided to restart Windows the following day and as soon as Domino started all messages that were previously stuck in mail.box for MOBILEEMAIL.VODAFONE.NET from the previous day were delivered successfully. It therefore appears there was a problem with Domino rather than the ISP and/or MOBILEEMAIL.VODAFONE.NET.
I read in this forum that somebody else had a similar problem when sending emails to hotmail.com and when they restarted the SMTP task mail that was stuck was delivered successfully.
I’ve checked with our ISP and Vodafone and they are not aware of any problems during the period.
I’ve now set SMTPCLIENTDEBUG=1 and turned mail logging to verbose (level 40) in case we have the problem again.
Any ideas on what caused this?
Thanks!
Subject: Update - Domino server fails message transfer with 'SMTP Protocol returned a transient error" sending to MOBILEEMAIL.VODAFONE.NET
We have just experienced the same problem where email is stuck in mail.box when being delivered to MOBILEEMAIL.VODAFONE.NET. The following is from the Notes log with Verbose Logging. After restarting the router task the emails are delivered.
Any ideas why this occurring, is it a problem with Vodafone, our ISP or Domino?
03/08/2008 18:37:05 Router: Transfer to server MOBILEEMAIL.VODAFONE.NET is ready with 1 messages
03/08/2008 18:37:05 Router: Transfer thread 00000009 searching for work
03/08/2008 18:37:05 Router: No messages transferred to MOBILEEMAIL.VODAFONE.NET (host MOBILEEMAIL.VODAFONE.NET) via SMTP: SMTP Protocol Returned a Transient Error
03/08/2008 18:37:10 Router: Failed to connect to SMTP host MOBILEEMAIL.VODAFONE.NET because SMTP Protocol Returned a Transient Error
Subject: Domino server fails message transfer with 'SMTP Protocol returned a transient error" sending to MOBILEEMAIL.VODAFONE.NET
On the face of it the ‘Transient Error’ sounds like a network/connection type error but some errors reported on the Domino console can be a bit misleading
Some things you can check:
In the server configuration, what is the Initial transfer retry interval? The default I think is something like 15 minutes, change this to 1 minute
It is found under the tabs:
Router/SMTP
Restrictions and controls
Then Transfer Controls
If that is already set to 1 then you could try to get hold of the mx records using nslookup which will give you the recipient’s mail server IP address. Then telnet on to this server and check if greylisting is being used.