It appears from this log that the earthlink server gave an incorrect 
response to the first ehlo attempt.
I suspect this is a bug at their end.  I tried connecting to that server 
to reproduce this problem but couldn't make it fail in this way, try 
resending the email as I suspect it's either intermittent, or they may 
have already fixed the fault at their end.


Another possibility is that you have some type of virus  or spam scanner 
that is messing with your smtp protocol and 'it' could have sent
the duplicate ehlo command...


On 17/09/2011 4:06 a.m., John Kelly wrote:
> Posted a couple of days ago. This only happens with Earthlink. Decided
> to do a bit more tracing. Here's what's in the log. Does anyone have an
> idea what's going on? It's like Earthlink looked for HELO vs EHLO first
> but it responded "Duplicate". Apparently Surgemail then tried HELO in
> vain. I can't find anything about this in the interface. Thanks.
>
> 16 11:00:24.42:5820: tcp_open_nice: succeeded
> 16 11:00:34.92:5820: q[42670] send in<-220 mx-stork.atl.sa.earthlink.net
> EL_4_2_10_GMA_41 ESMTP EarthLink SMTP Server Fri, 16 Sep 2011 12:00:28
> -0400 (EDT)
> 16 11:00:34.92:5820: q[42670] send out->EHLO spectrumdata.com
> 16 11:00:34.98:5820: q[42670] send in<-503 mx-stork.atl.sa.earthlink.net
> Duplicate HELO/EHLO
> 16 11:00:34.98:5820: Unexpected response 250, (503
> mx-stork.atl.sa.earthlink.net Duplicate HELO/EHLO)
> 16 11:00:35.00:5820: q[42670] send out->HELO spectrumdata.com
> 16 11:00:35.06:5820: q[42670] send in<-503 mx-stork.atl.sa.earthlink.net
> Duplicate HELO/EHLO
> 16 11:00:35.06:5820: Unexpected response 250, (503
> mx-stork.atl.sa.earthlink.net Duplicate HELO/EHLO)
> 16 11:00:35.06:5820: send: even helo failed (503
> mx-stork.atl.sa.earthlink.net Duplicate HELO/EHLO)
> 16 11:00:35.06:5820: send: finished sending a message fail all (HELO
> response (503 mx-stork.atl.sa.earthlink.net Duplicate HELO/EHLO))
> 16 11:00:35.06:5820: q[42670] send out->QUIT
> 16 11:00:35.14:5820: q[42670] send in<-221 mx-stork.atl.sa.earthlink.net
> closing connection
> 16 11:00:35.15:5820: send: not open [42670]
> 16 11:00:35.15:5820: Send_finish called from =HIDDEN@spectrumdata.com>
> 16 11:00:35.15:5820: Send_finish, reque = 0
> 16 11:00:35.17:5820: send_thread, send_finish
>
>
>
>
>