Thu Apr 24 14:43:24 PDT 2003 — Mail Server Issues and Upgrades: We enabled SMTP-AUTH on our mail server cluster early this afternoon. This should have been seamless, but was not due to a small misconfiguration on some of the servers in the cluster. SMTP-AUTH enables users to authenticate themselves so they may send mail through our servers when connected to remote networks. We have supported this through POP before SMTP, where the POP authentication information is passed along to sendmail. SMTP-AUTH is more reliable and POP-B4-SMTP will not be supported by the new mail cluster. This is just one of a few changes that we have been making to our existing cluster over the past few weeks to facilitate migration to the new cluster.
After the upgrade, we noted that Netscape mail clients attempt to authenticate if the server supports SMTP-AUTH. The misconfiguration caused the authentication to fail on some of the hosts preventing Netscape users from being able to send mail even if authentication wasn’t required to send the mail. If Netscape is not configured with a SMTP server username it will prompt the user to update their preferences. -Kelsey, Russ, John, Eli, Chris, etc.