One of the most frustrating things I do for living is troubleshooting mail delivery. Not because it’s incredibly frustrating and almost never my fault, but because I tend to get pwned by the most ridiculous “gotchas” of the SMTP.
Of the items that I probably deserve a Darwin Honorable Mention award for is troubleshooting delivery for an expired domain name, for a mail server that had the SMTP service stopped, that had the IP address changed, that had the letter 0 or O in the domain name and they just blurred together.
So today I set myself up for another “documentation writing” day and I have to say that I enjoy it. Writing about the products I’ve designed makes me realize how braindead some of our process is, nothing sounds quite so stupid than when you read it back to yourself. It also gives me ideas on how to improve the service, add in some gizmos that could help cut out a lot of time from troubleshooting.
Today, I proudly bring you the OWN Guide for Troubleshooting ExchangeDefender Delivery. Even if you are not an ExchangeDefender customer (come on!) the guide is general and verbose enough to give you an idea how to troubleshoot mail flow, diagnose issues with SMTP servers, create sample email messages from the command prompt.. I really hope you like it.
At the very worst you’ll learn how to install the telnet client for Microsoft Vista / 2008 Server from the command prompt. 
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