Re: Bounce or trace service failure?

Paul Hutchings:
> One of our users has just sent out a mailshot to 450 recipients.. not a
> common occurence by our usual standards.
>
> Whilst most have been delivered, or deferred for the "usual" reasons, I have
> a few that are visible via mailq as "(bounce or trace service failure)".
>
> I'm running Suse 9.0 with the latest snapshot from Carsten Hoegers Suse
> rpms.
>
> I know things like this are usually logs logs logs, but i'm having trouble
> knowing exactly which bits are relevant, this is a line for one of the
> recipients with this status, i'm hoping obscuring the email/ip doesn't
> matter too much -

Look for obvious signs of trouble
=================================

Postfix logs all failed and successful deliveries to a logfile. The
file is usually called /var/log/maillog or /var/log/mail; the exact
pathname is defined in the syslog.conf file.

First look for errors that prevent Postfix from working at all:

% egrep '(warning|error|fatal|panic):' /some/log/file | more

Note: the most important message is near the BEGINNING of the output.
Error messages that come later are less useful.

> Jan 27 08:34:35 relay postfix/smtp[23359]: 256EB6155:
> to=<someone@somedomain.com>, relay=mail.somedomain.com[1.2.3.4, delay=33,
> status=deferred (bounce or trace service failure)
>
> the domain is valid and has MX records, though from a quick look through the
> logs for previous mail to this recipient it would appear the local part may
> not be valid.
>
> TIA for any pointers,
>
> regards,
> Paul
> --
> Paul Hutchings
> Network Administrator, MIRA Ltd.
> Tel: 44 (0)24 7635 5378, Fax: 44 (0)24 7635 8378
> mailto:paul.hutchings@mira.co.uk
>
>
>