demon -> linux email confusion
mist
>Hi,
>
>Can anyone help me with the problem below?
>
*snip*
>
>I checked the firewall log today, and discovered a long list of entries
>which confuse me. It seems that the machine finch-punt-12.mail.demon.net has
>been trying repeatedly to connect to my local port 25... but the firewall
>has of course been denying access.
>
>What is happening here... am I losing any mail as a result, or making
>problems for Demon?
>
It's the normal behaviour for the demon punts to attempt to deliver mail
to you via smtp, unless you have disabled it for your account.
You wont lose mail as your firewall prevents the inbound connection from
succeeding, however it will retry at various intervals. (Obviously
unsuccessfully.)
>My understanding was that all incoming mail waits for me on the Demon POP3
>server until I fetch it. And that the Demon SMTP server just forwards on any
>mail I send to it.
>
For many ISPs that assumption would be correct, but Demon also try to
deliver mail via SMTP to you. (Server push instead of client pull, it's
quite useful for lots of people.)
>Why does finch-punt-12 want to talk to an SMTP server on my Linux box?
>
It's its purpose in life.
>Any advice gratefully received...
>
HTH. Btw, I think demon.ip.support.unix is a more relevant group for
this sort of thing. (F/Ups set there.)
--
Mist.