This one is a total timewaster – hence I thought I’d turn it into a blog in order to at least get something positive out of it.

Right, here is the scenario:

Client (call him BOB) has several mail accounts at domain.co.za – I will leave it as such for now. One of those accounts is, say, general@domain.co.za

Now, general@domain.co.za has a username and login, as per usual with e-mail accounts, and a mailbox on our mail server. It is not simply a mail alias.

So Proby gets a call from BOB complaining that his clients are receiving mail bounces. Actually it was one of those generic complaints of “my mail doesn’t go through!” hence it took us a while to find out that it is mail going TO him that are not going through – but I digress.

We check. bob@domain.co.za is fine. I can see mail going through on our logs.

Client insists that mail coming toward him are not coming through. After some prompting we get Bob to forward us an error message. Message reads thusly:

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

save to /var/spool/mail/do/domain/

generated by general@domain.co.za

(ultimately generated from bob@domain.co.za)

mailbox is full: retry timeout exceeded

Now that certainly narrowed our troubleshooting search! I go check general@domain.co.za and tru’sbob (parden the pun) the mailbox has 2069 e-mails just sitting there, using up 517megabytes of our precious mail server harddrive space.

I grep the mail logs and see tons of mail bounces from various @domain.com addresses. I figure it a long shot, but I run through all their mail addresses and every – single – one of them direct to general@domain.com as well as the mail owner.

And, as an added extra, general@domain.com does not download email. Wonderful.

After wastage of time like that I contact the client to explain – mails ARE going through to them, the bouce is NOT because THEY cannot receive mail. It is because of ONE account that ALL of them are pumping mail into for some reason. If they DOWNLOAD mail from that account from time to time the mail problem will disappear.

Ugh. I have no idea why they would do that, but such is the life of a sysadmin…

No related posts.