Evolution and SMTP

[Rob Chanter]

On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 11:38 +0000, Anthony Cunningham wrote:
> I'be been trying to use Evolution to send email via by dialup
> proivder's SMTP service. Whenever I try and send mail the operation
> fails and I get the following error message (I've delete the email
> address I was sending to and replaced it with foo at bar.com. It is a
> valid address):
> 
> "Error while performing operation.
> 
> RCPT TO <foo at bar.com> failed: Requested action not taken:
> mailbox unavailable."

It's probably a misleading response from Evolution. I tested this by
sending mail to a non-existent variation on my domain name and got the
same error message back from Evo (2.1.4 from Hoary):

220 mail.netspace.net.au ESMTP (thunder)
EHLO 220-253-44-239.VIC.netspace.net.au
250-mail.netspace.net.au
250-PIPELINING
250-SIZE 20480000
250-ETRN
250 8BITMIME
MAIL FROM:<robc at nudepenguins.org>
250 Ok
RCPT TO:<robc at nudepenguins.org.au>
450 <robc at nudepenguins.org.au>: Recipient address rejected: Domain not
found
QUIT
221 Bye

The SMTP server correctly rejects the session with a "destination
domain not found" error. Nice to see the Evolution authors are so
committed to an Outlook lookalike that they also choose to hide useful
information from users.

Bottom line: double-check your recipient addresses

cheers
rob