[OT] e-mail problems

[Peter Larsen]

On Thu, 2010-09-16 at 13:41 -0600, Frank Cox wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-09-16 at 15:16 -0400, Steve Blackwell wrote:
> > I'm struggling to explain why I appear to never have problems
> > when the router is taken out of the equation. How can I prove to my
> > ISP
> > that it is their problem?
> 
> How can I prove that the fact that I mowed my lawn yesterday didn't
> cause the pavement to collapse in front of the grocery store downtown?

Make a reproducable case. Something you know will not work with your
router. Test without your router. If you do manage to get the mail from
the external mail server without your router, I would suspect that
you're running somekind of scanning software on the router. Some have
filter options, in particular the more expensive models have features
where you can plug antivirus/bot scanners directly into the router and
it'll not route what it considers bad data through to your network.

It would also help if you described the problem in more details. For
instance, is it a matter of delay or is the email lost? If lost, make
sure your email client may not be moving it to another folder. So if you
create the above reproducable case, turn on debugging and see what your
client is doing with the mail that is missed.

Finally, you could have anti-spam bots running on your host that filters
out your mail. When you did the "direct attachment" you may not have
been running at full speed locally. The debugging on the mail client
should help you understand what module a email was sent to when it was
lost.

What would be very strange is if your system (router or host) doesn't
see the email at all, and you see a difference in getting emails from
using a direct or NAT'ed connection.

> In both instances, you're looking at two things that are REALLY
> unrelated to each other in any way.  There's nothing to "prove".

That would be my opinion too. So in order to really find out what's
going on, get a reproduceable case. See if you can email yourself from a
different account and have the delivery delayed or missing. 

-- 
Best Regards
  Peter Larsen

Wise words of the day:
And Bruce is effectively building BruceIX
	-- Alan Cox
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