Determine whether a mail was sent

[webber_1]

Hi,

My customers complain that they did not receive some mails.

OS: HP-UX 11.11

I check the /var/adm/syslog/mail.log, and find it has two message about delivery result.

1. stat=Sent (OK: <374c0cda0002b2c8@ultra.com.tw>)
2. stat=Sent (imss.ustc.com: Message accepted for delivery)

Which is deliver successfully?
What's difference the meaning of this two messages?
How to determine a mail is delivered successfully?

Thanks.

[Jeeshan]

do you use any spam blocker?

[Roberto Arias]

Hi all:

I think that you have any relay for forward mails.

The message 1 is when the mail has been sent out of system, the message 2 is when mail has benn sent out of system and is in server imss.utsc.com

regards

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

Maybe the mail did have two recipients, one @ultra.com.tw and the other @imss.ustc.com.
The first log message reports a successful delivery to the first recipient's mail server, the second to the other recipient's server.

Apparently those two servers use different mail server software, so the exact form of the acknowledging message is different. The text inside the parentheses is exactly what the remote server said.

(SMTP protocol messages contain a status code and a text part. Both of these messages have apparently had the same "successful" status code, so your sendmail reports "stat=Sent" in both cases. The text part is free-form and may or may not contain information that is useful in troubleshooting email problems, so it's copied to the mail.log as-is.)

So, any problems in the delivery of this particular message may have happened after the message left your server. Any information of problems like that is normally received in the form of bounce messages. Has the user account that was used to send this mail received any bounce messages?

If the account is configured not to receive mail, your only chance for further troubleshooting of this mail delivery would be to contact the admins of ultra.com.tw and/or imss.ustc.com.

MK

[Rita C Workman]

I agree with Matt. The mail went and was initially accepted for delivery.

It is possible that the receiving end then did some kind of spam check and found something in the header record it didn't like (root,servername..whatever), and then rejects or throw away the mail at that point.

In any event, it looks to be out of your hands. You can only confirm it got there, was received. After that it's on the other end to say what they did with it.

Rgrds,
Rita