Forgive my ignorance here, but I frequently get lots of messages
indicating mail failures due to too many hops. I recently decided that I
would remove these subscribers, but rather than doing it quietly I
figured I would send them notification. Since the unsubscribe
notifications wouldn't cause too many hops I figured they would get
there and people would see that they had been unsubscribed.
Anyway, most of the people whom I removed were not thrilled that I had
done so. Seems they have been receiving the list messages, despite their
apparent failure according to the bounce messages I've been getting.
My question is, what does an error message indicating too many hops
really mean. I know it means that the SMTP server feels there have been
too many re-routings in the message header, but does it mean it didn't
get delivered? Is it just a warning?
Finally, is there some way to hide the confirmation process within the
header of outgoing messages? Currently there are 8 Received: lines which
account for the steps each message must go through from coming in from
the poster to getting delivered to the first subscriber SMTP server (see
the headers below).
My setup is that I have one SMTP server for incoming mail
(mail.rc.on.ca) which re-routes messages for Listserv on to a machine
running both Listserv and LSMTP (listserv.lists.rc.on.ca). It would seem
that it adds a header entry when it passes the message from LSMTP to
Listserv, then back from Listserv to LSMTP to be sent to the moderator
(an address at mail.rc.on.ca). Once approved it goes through LSMTP to
Listserv, from Listserv back to LSMTP to be delivered to the subscribers
directly.
When the messages have additional hops from the posters mail system, or
if the subscriber's mail system requires additional hops for delivery,
its quite easy for the number of hops to go over 12 (or more). The
errors sometimes indicate that 12 was too many or 18, those seem to be
typical values.
Apart from reconfiguring how my machines are designated, any suggestions
as to how I can reduce the number of hops a message takes within my
control?
---------
Received: from lists.rc.on.ca by mail.rc.on.ca with SMTP (Microsoft
Exchange Internet Mail Service Version 5.0.1457.7)
id HQTQBC1A; Sun, 30 Mar 1997 07:28:00 -0500
Received: from listserv (207.176.151.4) by listserv.lists.rc.on.ca
(LSMTP for Windows NT v1.1a) with SMTP id
<[log in to unmask]>; 30 Mar 1997 7:04:36 -0500
Received: from RC.ON.CA by RC.ON.CA (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8c) with
spool
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Received: from mail.rc.on.ca (207.176.151.2) by listserv.lists.rc.on.ca
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---------
Cheers,
Russ
R.C. Consulting, Inc. - NT/Internet Security
owner of the NTBugTraq mailing list:
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