No virus here. And I tried it twice with a couple of days between. Unfortunately, Earthlink has no actual people working there.

On 9/18/2011 3:38 PM, SurgeMail Support wrote:

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 =<johnk@spectrumdata.com>
16 11:00:35.15:5820: Send_finish, reque = 0
16 11:00:35.17:5820: send_thread, send_finish