[Mimedefang] clamav/mimedefang

[Scott.Larnach at ed.ac.uk]

On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, cc wrote:

>    ----- Transcript of session follows -----
> ... while talking to mydomain.com.:
> >>> DATA
> <<< 554 5.7.1 Virus EICAR-Test-File found in mail - rejected
> 554 5.0.0 Service unavailable
...
> Can someone point out where I might find where this "service
> unavailable' is coming from?

Sorry about being a bit late with this answer, but this point doesn't
seem to have been convered yet.

The 'Service unavailable' is coming from the *sending* system, not the
receiving system. The sending system is running sendmail, which is
interpreting the 554 response from the remote as 'Service unavailable'.
So this does not indicate any problem with the receiving system.  The
sending system is trying to provide a user-friendly interpretation of
'554' for whoever gets the bounce... but based on just the SMTP reply
code this doesn't always work well. According to RFC2821, a '554'
response means 'Transaction failed' which is a pretty general response.

In the 'Transcript of session' that the sending sendmail generates, the
lines proceded by '>>>' are SMTP commands sent by the sending system,
those preceded by '<<<' represent replies from the remote system, and
all the rest is generated by the sending system when constructing its
error bounce message.

Scott Larnach, Edinburgh University