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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘SMTP’ Category

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Common SMTP message size limits

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/04/08

After a 2018 discussion with a “zorgkantoor” (Dutch for office that arranges for special long term health care needs, successor of AWBZ) about their very low (10 megabyte) SMTP message size limit – even though they expect scanned PDF documents.

Their web-care team posed this limit as normal, so I made a list of limits in their peer group, common world-wide and well-ranked Dutch internet providers.

My plan is to check the progression of these limits over time.

Note these are the bruto message sizes including encoded attachments. Since encoding in [WayBack] MIME Base64 – Wikipedia has a overhead of at least 37% (encoded size is at least 1.37 the original size), the unencoded maximum size is less than 73% of what is listed below.

References:

2018

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Communications Development, Development, eMail, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Python, Scripting, SMTP, SocialMedia, Software Development, TCP | Leave a Comment »

mail.com (handled by gmx.com) can reject SMTP connections as early as in the EHLO stage

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/04/06

I found this in one of my logs a a while ago:

Error when executing EHLO command for domain mail.com on SMTP server mx00.mail.com.
(554, 'mail.com (mxgmxus007) Nemesis ESMTP Service not available\nNo SMTP service\nBad DNS PTR resource record.\nFor explanation visit http://postmaster.gmx.com/en/error-messages?ip=37.153.243.242&c=rdns')

It means that gmx.de / mail.com are among the strictest email handling providers I know. I don’t blame them: EHLO is at the start of an extended SMTP session.

At [WayBack] Error messages | GMX Postmaster it indicates:

5xy Bad DNS PTR resource record

Emails from your email server were rejected because the PTR Resource Record (PTR-RR) of your IP address does not follow our guidelines. Possible reasons for this can be:

  • The PTR-RR states that the IP address was dynamically allocated.
  • The PTR-RR is a generic standard entry of your provider. Please allocate an independent and fully qualified domain name (Fully Qualified Domain Name – FQDN) to your email server and enter the corresponding valid PTR-RR.
  • Individual rejection of the PTR-RR for system protection reasons. Please contact the administrator of your system who should then contact us.

–jeroen

Posted in Communications Development, Development, eMail, Internet protocol suite, Power User, SMTP, SocialMedia, TCP | Leave a Comment »

Determine actual message size limit when you only get “552 5.3.4 Message size exceeds fixed limit”

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/26

Often when you send large emails the only  reply you get is a non-descriptive message like 552 5.3.4 Message size exceeds fixed limit from the SMTP server without an indication what the limit actually is.

Most SMTP servers however implement extensions in the EHLO greeting that returns a SIZE mail parameter. You can query it by hand using this:

telnet aspmx.l.google.com smtp
Trying 108.177.119.27...
Connected to aspmx.l.google.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mx.google.com ESMTP 32si3005669edb.510 - gsmtp
EHLO example.org
250-mx.google.com at your service, [80.100.143.119]
250-SIZE 157286400
250-8BITMIME
250-STARTTLS
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-PIPELINING
250-CHUNKING
250 SMTPUTF8
QUIT
221 2.0.0 closing connection 32si3005669edb.510 - gsmtp
Connection closed by foreign host.

There you can see the maximum message size at the time of writing is 157286400 bytes which is about 150 megabytes.

There is a nice Python script showing how to obtain it at [WayBack] Getting Information from EHLO | Erle Robotics Python Networking Gitbook Free (note this one does send an email, so you might want to trim the example if you just want to see the size).

More background reading:

Trimming down the Python script so it queries message size for each mail server of a domain

This turns out to be a tad more complex, because DNS functionality isn’t part of core Python, and the rdata part of DNS records ends with a dot, which might not be usable with the SMTP library.

References for me when trimming down:

–jeroen

Posted in Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Internet protocol suite, Power User, SMTP | Leave a Comment »

‪Dear #lazyweb, can anyone point me to a modern email server setup (just emai…

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/02/01

Summary from [WayBack]‪ Dear #lazyweb, can anyone point me to a modern email server setup (just email) with letsencrypt, some spam filter, multi domain preferably on RHEL/Cent… – Jan Wildeboer – Google+

  • many SMTP servers on the interwebs do not have proper TLS setups, so do not require remote SMTP servers to deliver email with a proper certificate
  • delivering mail via SMTP using STARTTLS with a proper certificate yourself is a good step forward
  • postfix
  • dovecot
  • greylisting (although in practice it does not make much of a difference any more)
  • fail2ban
  • dnsbl (often called rbl)
  • spamassasin
  • rspamd (supports SPF, DKIM and many others)
  • letsencrypt automation can be tough, so here is a small wrapper: [WayBack] GitHub – DrGlitchMX/update-letsencrypt: Tiny script for updating “Let’s Encrypt!” certificates from cron
  • it helps having letsencrypt and the mail server to be on one machine:
    • multidomain let’s encrypt cert that has my webserver name and the mailserver in the Subject Alternative Names field. As both are on the same machine certbot can automatically update it and I just point Postfix and Dovecot to the LE files.
  • Hans-Martin Mosner SMTP as-is is just not suitable for the kind of decentralized mail that you would prefer. You need some mechanism to determine which mail senders to trust and which not. Cryptography is suitable at the MUA level and should be used much more, but at the MTA level, TLS for privacy and SPF(bleh) or DKIM(meh) for sender domain authentication are basically your only weapons -much too weak. The PGP web of trust must be considered a failed experiment – who of your mail contacts uses PGP properly or at all? Ironically the only secure messaging solutions for the masses are centralized.

Things to do:

  • find a proper multi-MX fallback setup guide for postfix

–jeroen

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Communications Development, Development, Internet protocol suite, postfix, Power User, SMTP | Leave a Comment »

Testing SMTP from the console on Linux, BSD and Mac OS: swaks and smtp-cli Perl script clients

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/01/03

Testing SMTP using telnet is tedious as you have to remember the commands and responses in the SMTP protocol. It gets even harder when doing SMTP AUTH, as then you have to base encode a bunch of strings [WayBack] How to Test SMTP AUTH using Telnet [Wiki] | NDCHost

Luckily there is a Perl script swaks: [WayBack] Swaks – Swiss Army Knife for SMTP which does ESMTP and LMTP as well as TLS.

The funny thing is that the repository at jetmore/swaks: Swaks – Swiss Army Knife for SMTP only has the readme, but the not the script which you can get from [WayBack] swaks.pl.

Despite that, most Linux distributions have an installation package.

[WayBack] swaks for OpenSuse is in the [WayBack] network repository, so for Tumbleweed (actually: Factory) on Raspberry Pi you need to perform this:

zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/network/openSUSE_Factory_ARM/network.repo
zypper refresh
zypper install swaks

On Mac OS X it is even easier: if you have the homebrew package manager installed, you just install the [WayBack] swaks formula using the [WayBack] swaks.rb script:

brew install swaks

Note there is also the smtp-cli Perl script which I mentioned before at Fake/Mock SMTP servers and services for use during development, which also does TLS, but few environments have ready built packages for them. If you still want to try it out:

For SMTP AUTH:

swaks -tls --to jeroen.wiert.me@pluimers.com --from jeroen.wiert.me@pluimers.com --server smtp.xs4all.nl --auth-user username

Which prompts for the password, then outputs like this:

=== Trying smtp.xs4all.nl:25...
=== Connected to smtp.xs4all.nl.
<- 220 smtp-cloud3.xs4all.net ESMTP ESMTP server ready -> EHLO rmbpro1tbjwp
<-  250-smtp-cloud3.xs4all.net hello [188.206.68.219], pleased to meet you
<-  250-HELP
<-  250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN
<-  250-SIZE 157286400
<-  250-8BITMIME
<-  250-STARTTLS
<- 250 OK -> STARTTLS
<- 220 Ready to start TLS === TLS started with cipher TLSv1:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:256 === TLS no local certificate set === TLS peer DN="/OU=Domain Control Validated/OU=PositiveSSL Wildcard/CN=*.xs4all.nl" ~> EHLO rmbpro1tbjwp
<~  250-smtp-cloud3.xs4all.net hello [188.206.68.219], pleased to meet you
<~  250-HELP
<~  250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN
<~  250-SIZE 157286400
<~  250-8BITMIME
<~ 250 OK ~> AUTH LOGIN
<~ 334 ############ ~> anA=
<~ 334 ############ ~> ############################
<~ 235 ... authentication succeeded ~> MAIL FROM:<jeroen.wiert.me@pluimers.com>
<~  250 <jeroen.wiert.me@pluimers.com> sender ok
 ~> RCPT TO:<jeroen.wiert.me@pluimers.com>
<~  250 <jeroen.wiert.me@pluimers.com> recipient ok
 ~> DATA
<~ 354 enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself ~> Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2017 09:09:57 +0200
 ~> To: jeroen.wiert.me@pluimers.com
 ~> From: jeroen.wiert.me@pluimers.com
 ~> Subject: test Wed, 19 Jul 2017 09:09:57 +0200
 ~> Message-Id: <20170719090957.052207@rmbpro1tbjwp>
 ~> X-Mailer: swaks v20170101.0 jetmore.org/john/code/swaks/
 ~> 
 ~> This is a test mailing
 ~> 
 ~> .
<~ 250 smtp-cloud3.xs4all.net accepted mail mXA71v00C4jr6ac01XA9Bo for delivery ~> QUIT
<~  221 smtp-cloud3.xs4all.net ESMTP closing connection
=== Connection closed with remote host.

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Communications Development, Development, Hardware Development, Internet protocol suite, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, Raspberry Pi, SMTP, SuSE Linux, Tumbleweed | Leave a Comment »

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