smtp strangeness

[Ambrose Li <news-misc@mingpaoxpress.com>]

A user complained about not being able to send a mail a while ago, &
what I found out is that because the mail is too large (4 megs), the
remote server refuses to accept the mail; zmailer then generates a
4 meg error message back to our mail hub. But somehow the error
message got stuck in our gateway. "mailq -svv" produces the following
anomalous output (I think the vtx=NULL?? is anomalous):

bash# mailq -svv
0 entries in router queue: idle
2 messages in transport queue: working
smtp/www.mingpaoxpress.com:
<<- RCPT To:<user@www.mingpaoxpress.com> ORCPT=rfc822;user@www.mingpaoxpre->> 503 5.5.1 Waiting for MAIL command (running now, pid=16449 vtx=NULL??, expires in 1d22h, tries=11)
          id    <19970718214903Z19897-1072+1@babbage.mingpaoxpress.com>, 4518022 bytes, age 1h28m
          to    user@www.mingpaoxpress.com
<<- RCPT To:<user@www.mingpaoxpress.com> ORCPT=rfc822;user@www.mingpaoxpre->> 503 5.5.1 Waiting for MAIL command (retry in 2m10s, expires in 23h29m20s, tries=189)
          id    <19970717224719Z19878-1071+3@babbage.mingpaoxpress.com>, 4518022 bytes, age 1d30m
          to    user@www.mingpaoxpress.com
bash#

(After a while "mailq -svv" shows pid=0 too, which doesn't make sense
either.)

Both machines are running zmailer 2.99.49p3 on Linux 2.0.30.

Has anyone any idea what the problem is here? Thanks.


--
Ambrose C. Li <acli@mingpaoxpress.com>         / Please use home address
Programmer-analyst                            / <acli@acli.interlog.com>
Ming Pao Newspapers (Canada) Ltd.            / for private mail
+1 416-321-0088  1355 Huntingwood Drive, Scarborough ON, Canada  M1S 3J1