Re: Debugging SMTP-Connection...

[Matthias Andree <ma+balsa dt e-technik uni-dortmund de>]

On Sun, 16 Sep 2001, Christian Bockermann wrote:

> Sorry, for mailing again. I get another strange behaviour concerning
> balsa sending mail. Sometimes I write a mail with a local mailserver
> for outgoing traffic. When sending this mail I get a dialog from balsa
> (as usual) with something like "250 OK. From: chris@dorf.....", but
> that dialog never vanishes and the mail stays in my outbox folder.

qmail really sucks when it comes to debugging like this. (Postfix
captures SMTP dialogues on request, $debug_peer_list in main.cf). 

Or you can use ngrep (try: ngrep -d INTERFACE port 25) or ethereal's
"tethereal" with -x option (try the same syntax as tcpdump otherwise).

> I would like to investigate this further, but I don't have a clue how
> to get more debugging information other than "netstat -a" or the
> logfiles of the mailservers. Can I get a log of balsa's dialog with the
> mailservers anyhow ?

Never debug these problems with the suspect's means. Use tools which you
presume are correct or network-level dumps.