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554 Too many hops - psmtp

Issue
Loop in mail delivery.

Symptoms

Notifications, Alerts, and Message Center deliveries are quarantined.

Messages bounce with the SMTP error code "554 Too many hops"

Resolution
The sender server sees the error, "451 Remote connection lost - psmtp". 

There is a loop in the delivery logic for the domain. The most likely source of this type of issue is that Postini always checks the DNS MX entries for a machine name before delivery and routes mail to the highest priority MX record, depending on DNS configuration, this could route Postini to deliver to Postini.

 

This solution applies to all e-mails which are sent from the Postini cluster's outgoing mail servers:

 

- Welcome Notifications

- Junk Email Notifications

- Alias Creation Confirmations

- All Quarantined Emails delivered from the Message Center

- Wireless

- Activation Notifications (External, Internal)

- Alerts

- Messages delivered from spool.

 

Check the Server Configuration and DNS MX entries to ensure that there is no MX entry for the fully qualified machine name for the mail server:

 

1) Select the email config from the Choose Org pull-down list.

2) Go to Inbound Servers > Delivery Manager.

3) Click Edit in the dark gray bar above the graph.

4) Look at the configured mail server (e.g. mail.mydomain.com).

5) Do a dig on the MX entries for the mail server. (On UNIX/Linux, the command is: dig mail.mydomain.com mx)

 

If the dig returns MX entries pointing to Postini such as:

 

mail.mydomain.com. 10M IN MX 100 mail.mydomain.com.sNa1.psmtp.com.

mail.mydomain.com. 10M IN MX 200 mail.mydomain.com.sNa2.psmtp.com.

mail.mydomain.com. 10M IN MX 300 mail.mydomain.com.sNb1.psmtp.com.

mail.mydomain.com. 10M IN MX 400 mail.mydomain.com.sNb2.psmtp.com.

 

then this is the source of the loop. RFC 821 requires that a SMTP server do an MX record lookup a domain before delivery, and since that MX record points to Postini servers, the message will be delivered from Postini directly back to Postini.

 

To correct this, either:

 

1) Remove the MX entries for mail.mydomain.com. Entries should already exist for mydomain.com pointing to Postini.

or

2) Configure the Delivery Mgr of the Admin Console with the actual IP for your mail server into the field mentioned above. This will prevent Postini from looking up the MX entries for the delivery server. See the solution entitled "Delivery Mgr: Changing the mail server associated with a Server Configuration" for step-by-step instructions on how to do this.

 

Additional Information:

 

The email server field allows you set an alternate mail host name for receiving email traffic from Postini. If no value is set, the default value of postini-mail.domain.com is currently being used. Setting this field will override this default value. Be careful to enter a new email server name correctly and only change this after the necessary DNS changes have been completed and tested.

 

The email server field can contain the IP address or name of an email server. Mail delivered to Postini users in organizations beneath the Server Configuration is sent to that configured server. If a name is specified, you must be sure that a DNS A or CNAME record exists that will point to one or more IP addresses of your email servers.

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