Slashdot Mirror
GMail and Sourceforge E-mail Bouncing Saga
An anonymous reader writes "All e-mail going back and forth from Sourceforge and Gmail is being bounced. This leaves many Open Source projects with helpless mailing lists. Fortunately, Sourceforge blames Google and Google is blaming SourceForge for this. The Sourceforge support site is clogged with support requests for a resolution to this problem. Google's response to this bouncing has been automated e-mails saying it is probably at the other end of mail delivery. This is something that the community needs to know about since it has been going on for a week already with no end in sight." Worth noting that Sourceforge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG. Update 20:07 GMT by SM: According to SourceForge support staff this issue is now resolved. Apparently a few days ago the sender-verify to gmail started resulting in 450 errors. Google has since either corrected this issue or whitelisted SourceForge and several tests of the system have resulted in correct delivery.
The message linked to in the post says the person is having trouble with both gmail and sending mail from his own domain. I have also had trouble with sourceforge, where mails from my ISP seemed to be "eaten" about half the time. I've just moved mailing lists off sourceforge, although I'm still using them as their svn support is good. Unless anyone else is having trouble with gmail, I'm tempted to just lay all of the blame at sourceforge.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
I've had cases where mail coming from SourceForge never reached me; their servers never even attempted to connect to my e-mail server (i.e. nothing in the logs to indicate this). I was running my own DNS at the time, at a colocation center, and never had problems sending or receiving e-mail before with any other domains.
Sourceforge is posting the following message to bug reports about this problem.
Greetings,
We're aware of the difficulties in the interaction
between
our mailing list services and Gmail. Our network operations
team
is currently aware of the issue and is working with Gmail
administration on a resolution.
-Jay Bonci
Systems Programmer Analyst,
Sourceforge.net
Somebody posted a SMTP dialog to one of the bug reports:
Example:
telnet mail.sourceforge.net 25
Trying 66.35.250.206...
Connected to mail.sourceforge.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.sourceforge.net ESMTP Exim 4.44 Sat, 30 Sep
2006 01:12:02 -0700 sc8-sf-mx1.sourceforge.net
HELO aisa.fi.muni.cz
250 mail.sourceforge.net Hello 14397 at aisa.fi.muni.cz [147.251.48.1]
mail from:
250 OK
rcpt to:
451-Could not complete sender verify callout
451-Could not complete sender verify callout for <anyone@gmail.com>
451-The mail server(s) for the domain may be temporarily unreachable, or
451-they may be permanently unreachable from this server. In the latter case,
451-you need to change the address or create an MX record for its domain
451-if it is supposed to be generally accessible from the Internet.
451 Talk to your mail administrator for details.
QUIT
221 mail.sourceforge.net closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.
Sourceforge's mail server is doing a callback to gmail.com, to verify the sender address is accepted by gmail.com. This check is screwing up. It's Sourceforge's problem. Callback verify is not covered by any RFC, so SF has gone above and beyond the standards, it is their responsibility to make sure their SMTP service is interoperable with standard servers, not the other way around. Google can provide logs of the failed callbacks, but that's all the burden they should assume. It's SF's problem to fix.
Edith Keeler Must Die