question about smtp error 5.1.1 and Outlook

Doug Finch dfinch at bynari.net
Fri Sep 11 00:01:00 CEST 2009


Liutauras,
If you want to test this, you can simply set up a POP3 account in Outlook and then compose and email to an illegitimate address.  What you will see happen is you will immediately receive a "System Administrator" email stating that there was an error and the message could not be delivered.  If you go to your "Sent Items" folder, you will see that the message appears "sent".  This being the case, you can probably blame "Bill" if it helps ;)

Regards,

Doug Finch
Director of Technical Support
Bynari, Inc.
Skype ID: dfsixstring
"Sharing Made Easy..."
(sent with BETA 4.0 Connector)

-----Original Message-----
From: Liutauras Adomaitis [mailto:liutauras.adomaitis at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2009 3:08 PM
To: Doug Finch
Cc: kolab-users at kolab.org
Subject: Re: question about smtp error 5.1.1 and Outlook

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Doug Finch <dfinch at bynari.net> wrote:
> What you are seeing is actually a "feature request" made by several of our users.  In earlier versions of Connector 3, the Connector would 1) send the message, then 2) upload that message to the server "Sent Items" folder.  This meant that when a user clicked on their "Sent Items" folder in Outlook, it would synchronize that folder.  This could render Outlook unusable during the synchronization process.
>
> Users wanted to have the mail moved (in Outlook) directly from Outbox to "Sent Items" to improve performance.  In version 4.0 of the Connector, there is quite a bit of different logic in how it handles mail delivery and synchronization.
>
> To answer the original question, it is not a "bug" - but a request from our users.

Yes, but I see a bit of problem here: if email was not sent it should
not appear in Sent Items folder. In Outlook + Binary case it appears
in Sent Items, but is not actually sent. Other clients (Thunderbird,
Kontact) pop up error window with error and email with wrong rcpt
stays in Outbox.
Users are complaining about this behavior, because they think that if
one recipient is wrong email should be delivered to all correct
recipients. If it is not sent it should not appear in Sent Items.
Here i see problem in Outlook behavior. I don't know the exact smtp
specification, but it seems, that if smtp service receives email with
multiple TO recipients to be delivered locally it should check all of
the recipients and if any is wrong the message should be rejected.
This is what I see from TB and Kontact behavior. Outlook is different:
first of all the error is not as in TB or in Kontact. Actually it is
not error, but a email from "System Administrator" and it makes people
think that email was sent, but failed just for few recipients and they
repeat the messages only to the failed recipients.

What is the explanation of this Outlook behavior? I mean what to say
to users - is it "the Bill" fault?

Liutauras




More information about the users mailing list