Hi,

I've got a problem

System: 2 Exchange 2000 Service Pack 3 systems on the same LAN in the
same Routing group.
SMTP Smarthost: Exim / Linux

Abstract:
The above system is working fine. Despite of the fact that internal
mails sent between the E2k Servers are not transfered.
Such mails are caused by Public Folder Replication or by addressing
users on the other E2K Server.
The E2k servers are sending these mails to the smarthost, to Exim. These
mails seem to be not RFC conform. Exim does not accept them.

Issues:
- How to get these mails RFC compliant ?
- How to have these mails transfered directly between the E2k systems
although there is a smart host ? Defining different connectors does not
work, by the way.

In Detail:

The MS Exchange server tries to route the mail through our Exim SMTP
gateway. The SMTP sessions all fail to complete, because Exchange never
correctly notifies Exim about the end of DATA. After five minutes, the
receiving Exim times out and logs:

> SMTP data timeout (message abandoned) on connection from ...

To me, it seems that Exchange doesn't give Exim any acceptable info
about the end of the bytes to receive after DATA. The only indication is
the SIZE= info in the MAIL command (which shall NOT be used for
specification of actual content length, according to RFC1870). The only
other indication could be the ".\r\n" termination of the DATA stream,
but it shall be interpreted as end-of-data only if it follows "\r\n"
(i.e. it is a single dot on a line by itself). But in our case there is
no line termination before the dot. And a \r\n.\r\n could occur in the
binary data by chance anyway... To me it seems it is a serious problem
that Exchange transmits raw binary data. Is it possible to tell Exchange
to encode the data using Base64 or the like?

The following is a trace of the session, recorded using Ethereal tcpdump
(at the Exim server side), converted to text using Ethereal. FYI, there
are no lost packets, no firewalls, no networks with different MTU and no
other low level disturbances involved. I have indented all of our Exim
server's lines with '> '. Following the "From:" line, the Exchange
server transmits binary data. I've only included the first and final
bytes in hex for readability. You can see it ends with some binary data
(but no linefeed) followed by 0x2E, 0x0D, 0x0A (.\r\n).

> 220 mail.thecompany.de SMTP Exim 3.34 4 Wed, 30 Aug 2006 15:12:01 +0200
EHLO temporaer.thecompany.de
> 250-mail.thecompany.de Hello temporaer.thecompany.de [190.170.126.67]
> 250-SIZE 8000000
> 250-PIPELINING
> 250 HELP
MAIL FROM: SIZE=2191
> 250 is syntactically correct
RCPT TO:
> 250 is syntactically correct
DATA
> 354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself
Received: by temporaer.thecompany.de
id ; Tue, 29 Aug 2006
16:48:58 +0200
content-class: urn:content-classes:message
Subject:
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 16:48:58 +0200
Message-ID:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: application/ms-tnef;
name="winmail.dat"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
X-MS-Has-Attach:
X-MS-TNEF-Correlator:

Thread-Index: AcbLekKGW4sdjES1RYqOmAZmBTY+ig==
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.6249.0
From: "/O=thecompany
GmbH/OU=thecompany/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=TEMPORAER/cn=Microsoft
Public MDB"
[0D 0A 78 9F 3E 22 02 0D 01 ... 65 6C 6F 73 2E 64 65 3E 00 00 00 EB DC
2E 0D 0A]
[five minutes pass]
> 421 mail.thecompany.de SMTP incoming data timeout - closing connection.
QUIT


I appreciate you help,
Oliver

Archived from group: microsoft>public>exchange2000>protocols