When sitting in the airport on a wireless connection which seems to work for free, I unfortunately have an IP address where the reverse DNS is operated by idiots and contains underscores: 61_219_103_66-WIFI_HOTSPOTS.eng.telusmobility.com Two problems result from this. Firstly, Evolution violates RFC2821 by using that name in the EHLO greeting when sending mail, and is rightly told to sod off by my mail server: sending : EHLO 61_219_103_66-WIFI_HOTSPOTS.eng.telusmobility.com received: 250-pentafluge.infradead.org Hello 61_219_103_66-WIFI_HOTSPOTS.eng.telusmobility.com [66.103.219.61] received: 250-SIZE 52428800 received: 250-8BITMIME This server supports 8bit MIME received: 250-ETRN received: 250-EXPN received: 250-STARTTLS This server supports STARTTLS received: 250 HELP sending : STARTTLS received: 220 TLS go ahead sending : EHLO 61_219_103_66-WIFI_HOTSPOTS.eng.telusmobility.com received: 250-pentafluge.infradead.org Hello 61_219_103_66-WIFI_HOTSPOTS.eng.telusmobility.com [66.103.219.61] received: 250-SIZE 52428800 received: 250-8BITMIME This server supports 8bit MIME received: 250-ETRN received: 250-EXPN received: 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN CRAM-MD5 received: 250 HELP <...> received: 235 Authentication succeeded sending : MAIL FROM:<dwmw2> received: 250 OK sending : RCPT TO:<Massimo.Gaetani> received: 550-Mail rejected. Underscores in HELO are not permitted by RFC2821. The second problem is that Evolution misreports the error message, so I have to either run with CAMEL_VERBOSE_DEBUG=1 or log in to the mail server and look at the logs in order to see what _actually_ happened. Instead of reporting the above error message, Evolution makes something up -- it says "Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable".
Please file this upstream: http://bugzilla.ximian.com
Sorry, I cannot. Ximian bugzilla does not let me log in -- a login attempt appears successful, but then an immediately subsequent attempt to _do_ anything fails, and prompts me to log in again... ad infinitum.
In response to the second part of the bug, it sounds like what you really what is a "Show Details" button than shows the exact error from the server (aimed at techies), and for the main error message to say something more user-friendly (aimed at non-techies) - "Requested action not taken" isn't a great error message. However I'm not sure exactly what the wording should be here, and if enough information is available to choose a good error message without major retooling, alas.
I don't think we should display a made-up error message by default, and display the actual error only if the user presses a 'Details' button. Display nothing but "Sending mail failed", with a 'Details' button if you really must -- but don't give a bogus error message.
Not that I like the Evo's made-up error message but the reason why it's so misleading is because the server reports error only after the RCPT TO: not immediately.
Created attachment 113495 [details] patch to validate HELO args and fall back to bare IP address if necessary
Fixing summary. The misleading error message is filed separately as bug #165271.
Patch added to evolution-data-server-1.5.4-2