Sean's blog

Streamyx SMTP AUTH mail proxy

I thought I’d better write a quick up date to the previous article I wrote, since it gets a lot of hits. The information is a bit outdated in the old article, and our problems have moved on since. I changed our sendmail config at lolyco.com some time ago, in response to an exchange of emails with the TM Net mail admins (who are in my experience the most responsive staff at TM). TM have updated their online instructions too. The two most important lines to update are in config.mc:

define(`SMART_HOST',`[smtp-proxy.tm.net.my]')dnl

and in auth/client-info (or whatever it’s called on your system):

AuthInfo:smtp-proxy.tm.net.my "U:username" "P:password" "M:LOGIN"

This seems to have reduced the number of mails we get returned by yahoo and AOL due to smtp.streamyx.com being blacklisted as a spam relay, but is not without its own ‘quirks’.

Since using the new server, we still see a few problems in our logs:

AUTH=client, available mechanisms do not fulfill requirements
stat=Deferred: Temporary AUTH failure

… which is not so bad, as the problem seems to ‘go away’ after a while and mail is eventually delivered.

The ‘domain does not resolve’ problem was a bit of a disaster when it happened several times back in August, when we got this message a few times:

Domain of sender address <notmyname@notmydomain.com> does not resolve. Please register your domain.

We haven’t seen that one lately, but an email to help@tm.net.my at the time seemed to get it speedily fixed.

I hope that’s useful. What else has changed at TM? I see they’ve changed the wording of their Terms and Conditions from “best effort” to “best endeavours”. Glad to see their lawyers are earning their wages – they must have felt ‘effort’ implied something measurable.