X400: Delivery Fails when Message Has Too Many TO: Recipients

 Last reviewed: October 20, 1997
Article ID: Q115438
3.00 3.20 MS-DOS kbother kbbug3.00 kbbug3.20

The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Mail Gateway to X.400, versions 3.0 and 3.2

SYMPTOMS

When a message has more TO: recipients than the MTA can process, the system logs: 

   ERROR 1025 (allocating memory): allocating memory
Some recipients presumably will not get the message, but the originator receives no indication of this.

Note: The number 1025 above refers to the number of bytes requested from memalloc(); it is not an error code per se.

CAUSE

No message is sent, so there is no possibility of some (X.400) recipients getting the message and some not. And the sender does get a mail failure report. It's not clear where the point of failure is.

The gateway uses more memory when translating the message from MSMail to X400\OUTGOING than when sending the message from \x400\outgoing to the external MTA, which implies that the gateway fails when translating the message to X.400.

RESOLUTION

The FROM and SUBJECT fields of failed messages now are logged as WARNING messages so the Administrator can easily spot a problem message and dequeue the mail.

An initial failure to deliver the same message still causes the loop with "ERROR allocating memory," but after a reboot the gateway logs the SUBJECT and FROM information about the problem message in the X400xxx.LOG file, tries three times to deliver the message, then deletes it and makes an entry in the SYSTEM.LOG file: 

   Failure to queue diagnostic back to sender, unknown error
The originator receives no indication of the failure.

The README recommends at least 400K free RAM for gateway operation.

Additional reference words: 3.00 3.20
KBCategory: kbother kbbug3.00 kbbug3.20
KBSubcategory: MailGWX400

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Last reviewed: October 20, 1997
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