Sendmail Problem.

[Jason Young]

Hi,

I was after an answer / opinion. Every now and them I get a message back to my sendmail server (HP/UX 11.11) with the following information:

503 server.someone.com Duplicate HELO/EHLO
554 ... Service unavailable

My gut feel is that this is a problem at the receiving sever as the sendmail server at our end does not seem to have any errors and is working for everything else. I send a "heartbeat" message to this server every one hour and only sometimes get the problem.

Any Ideas??

Jason Young

[Marco Paganini]

Hello Jason,

That seems to indicate that someone is connecting to your smtp server and sending two HELO messages.

The SMTP protocol requires a HELO message before anything else. If someone (either a person or a program) sends two HELO messages, you'll see this message on your syslog.

Nothing to worry about.

Regards,
Paga

[Jason Young]

Thanks for that. The message I refered to was being sent back to my sever as an error email. Does that mean my server was sending 2 HELO commands ?? If so why would the standard sendmail product send something different sometimes ?