Just Thoughts

It is very interesting handling the email server. Depending on your organizations setup of the email system as a whole, servers for sending emails, servers from storing, servers for filtering, etc. You’ll have many failure point scenarios when troubleshooting a problem. The more complicated the setup, the more intriguing the troubleshooting process.

One of the things that email systems do upon failure to perform their tasks is to send the end user a Non-Delivery Report (NDR), that pretty much helps you pinpoint the problem.

If a user calls in a problem whether from your organization or another attempting to send to your organization, ask them to send the NDR received.

Lately a user attempting to send to a group in our company received the below:

(554 5.5.2 Invalid data in message)

• Made sure that they and we can send and receive between each other with relatively small sized attachments, in other words we didn’t blacklist each other and we have no attachment size problem.
• Asked to be provided the details of the email, attachment size and name. The attachment’s name was over 150 characters long! The email filter/firewall can be configured to enlarge the message size.
• Asked the user to resend the email after renaming the attachment with fewer characters
• Received email

Email servers have many features and configurations. Problems help you understand them more. Still I’m in the beginning of the road