Incorrect state for auth

[sterling]

We have a new client that is having issues with their reservation software sending email confirmations. The same computer that the program is running on can send emails out from Outlook Express without any issues. We do not have any other clients having problems and it seems the issue is only happening with the reservation software but the reservation software vendor says that the issue is not on the end. The software could send out email confirmations on their previous host without any problems.

Have any of you ran into this problem with the error message "incorrect state for auth" before and if so how did you resolve it?

Thanks in advance!

[Code Crafters]

You can check the SMTP logs for what errors were given during this email delivery attempt. If you email me an SMTP log exerpt showing this transaction to chris@code-crafters.com I'll look into it and try to explain what the problem is. If you can, temporarily enable debug logging in the Logging settings and then resend the reservation email and send me a more detailed debug log of the transaction. You shouldn't leave debug logging on for long though as it will generate a lot of files very quickly as it records every line of the SMTP conversation including the entire mail sent which is why it should be enabled only if necessary for debugging of a problem.

[sterling]

Chris,

I have just sent you an email containing part of the log.

Thanks,
Sterling

[Code Crafters]

I had a look at the code for that part of the SMTP and the error "Incorrect state for auth" is given when the mail client hasn't given an authenticted EHLO message before trying to do an SMTP authentication handshake. The log you sent simply doesn't give enough information for me to see in any detail what happened unfortunately.

Could you please temporarily enable debug logging for SMTP and send me the debug log of the SMTP conversation to chris@code-crafters.com which I can analyse to see exactly what went wrong? Turn off debug logging once you've done that though as it will very quickly generate a lot of files on a busy mail server since it records every line of conversation including the entire email sent.

[sterling]

Chris,

I just emailed you with the smtp conversation with debugging on.

Thanks,
Sterling

[Code Crafters]

Now I have the full conversation I can see what's going on properly. The client is issuing an EHLO (SMTP authentication hello) then RSET (reset all mail transaction states) then doing an AUTH command and which point our mail server responds with Incorrect state for AUTH probably due to the reset command. Because AUTH is an extension of SMTP its possible that our interpretation of the RSET in conjunction with AUTH may be wrong requiring a code tweak. It's also possible that the client could be wrong since we've not heard of this being reported before.

Could you please give me full details of the mail client and version that causes this error so that I can try to reproduce the scenario for further testing to try to resolve this issue in the next AMS2 update? Please provide any other client setup details (AUTH type used etc.) you think are necessary to reproduce the error.