How to Make a Permanent 5yz Error Return a Temporary 4yz Error Instead (Doc ID 1955418.1)

Last updated on MAY 25, 2021

Applies to:

Goal

How can we make a relaying MTA (not an MTA directly receiving the submission from a client) return a temporary (4yz) failure instead a permanent (5yz) failure?

This being a relaying MTA means that the sending MTA has received the original submission from the actual client.

That means a temporary error will leave the sending MTA with the responsibility to retry the message, whereas if it was a client submitting the message, a temporary error would be essentially no different from a permanent error -- the client is still generally not prepared to retry later.

In this case, the client is an admin/provisioning system sending a welcome message at exactly the same time as creating the object in LDAP.

The application submitted that message to some other MTA (call it MTA#1).

The Messaging Server MTA (MTA#2) is receiving the relay of that message from MTA#1.

Due to LDAP replication performance issues, the first lookup of the recipient done by MTA#2 may find no matching results, because the replica LDAP server it is using has not yet received the object.

If MTA#2 could return a temporary error instead of a permanent error, then MTA#1 would retry the message instead of bouncing it.
 

Solution

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