Hi List, today we had an outage of our internet provider. The connection was broken for several hours during which the mail server of the internet provider stored our e-mails. Now after the connection is established again these mails are sent to our own mail server from the provider's server at a pretty high rate. Our system is SuSE 9.2 with Postfix 2.1.5 as the SMTP server and the SUSEfirewall which comes with 9.2. All current patches are applied. The problem now is that after a small number of mails from our provider the SMTP server does not accept any more connections. Instead it complains about timeouts, lost connections or SMTP EOFs. When telnetting to the server in this state a connection is made but there is no prompt "220 <servername> ESMT Postfix". The only way to fix this I found up to now is restarting Postfix (the cron job does it now every 3 minutes...) but that is only a very crude fix. Even setting the max_use parameter in main.cf to 1 to get a new smtpd for each connection does not help. Has anybody an idea what is causing this behaviour? Is it the firewall or is it Postfix or anything else who is limiting the connections? There are some firewall errors in the logs, but not nearly as many as the lost connections of the SMTP server: Mar 17 21:52:18 pluto kernel: SFW2-OUT-ERROR IN= OUT=dsl0 SRC=<our IP> DST= LEN=52 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=64 ID=3530 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=25 DPT=58506 WINDOW=1404 RES=0x00 ACK RST URGP=0 OPT (0101080A015E41E40C059CEB) Any help would be greatly appriciated! Jürgen