Email bounce - error 421 Lost Incoming Connection

[mwisk]

Earlier today a friend sent me an email (to my HostPC account). She told me that it bounced back to her which, obviously, concerns me.

I looked at the bounced email, and saw that it was a "local delivery failed" error with a "421 Lost incoming connection" error.

This is not the first time I've had friends tell me that they've sent me email that's bounced back with this exact same error. My worry is that this happens more frequently than I might even know and I could potentially miss an important email. (Note, she sent another email 5 minutes later and it worked just fine. No errors. No Failures)

Below is a copy/paste of the "Mail Delivery Failed" email that she received. I've anti-spammified both her email address and mine, and I removed the content of what she sent to me, but the error is clear.

Thanks for any thoughts on this and how it can be avoided.

X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.2
Delivered-To: HerRemovedInfo@HerEmailAddress.com
X-Failed-Recipients: MYremovedInfo@MYHostPCdomain.com
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
From: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon@www32.hostpc.com>
To: HerRemovedInfo@HerEmailAddress.com
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2006 09:11:02 -0400

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

MYremovedInfo@MYHostPCdomain.com
local delivery failed

The following text was generated during the delivery attempt:

------ MYremovedInfo@MYHostPCdomain.com ------

An error was detected while processing a file of BSMTP input.
The error message was:

421 Lost incoming connection

The SMTP transaction started in line 0.
The error was detected in line 3.
0 previous messages were successfully processed.
The rest of the batch was abandoned.
421 Lost incoming connection
Transaction started in line 0
Error detected in line 3

------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------

[admin]

Open a helpdesk ticket with some more details. This error typically fixes itself - and occurs whenever there's too much incoming mail. Exim is nortorious for it :(

[mutter]

I'm getting this error too, very annoying. My helpdesk ticket was responded to with "there is no cause and no cure." No cause? I'm pretty sure something is causing it.

A google search turns up strong suspicion of spamassassin causing the problem. I'll turn that off to see if it helps.

[tonydi]

I have three clients with domains here at HostPC who are experiencing this issue. Yet my domain and two additional clients' sites don't (knock wood).

I've been told that it's SpamAssassin in combination with Exim that causes this error. I'm not sure exactly which of those two companies is responsible so, if this is true, that always seems to delay fixes while the two parties argue over "ownership" of the bug.

Hopefully one of the HostPC guys will correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that disabling SA on your domain won't matter. The SA process is running on the server side for every account whether you enable it or not.

[huesmann2]

Well, I for one wish SA+Exim would get the issue sorted out or HPC move to a different app or combo, because it's getting ridiculous how long this has gone.

[starfighter]

Unfortunately the only other mail software that DA supports has other major issues, so were stuck between 2 rocks. It was in response to previous customer complaints that the current software was installed.

[huesmann2]

Anyone got any suggestions for another hosting service?

[eugene]

Do you mean another for email services? I use gmail hosted for one of my domains.
If you mean for hosting services, this is not the place to ask such a question!

:love