[courier-users] Courier/Hotmail Problems

[Carey J. <ca...@it...>]

I'm having a devil of a time getting email delivered reliably from our
courier server to Hotmail.  Users complain about frequent DSNs and bounces.
I've tried various retry settings, e.g., retryalpha = one second and
retrybeta = 10 times, with some improvement, but still frequent delays.
I've tried smart-relaying through our ISP's relay server, and even it
returns bounces occasionally, though not quite so frequently.  Curiously, I
can send to hotmail flawlessly, no delays, from a qmail backup server, but I
don't want to create a dependency by relaying through it.  Besides, just on
principal, I don't think I should have to use another mail server for this;
I like Courier.

I know that hotmail's setup is somewhat non-standard, and the situation is
exacerbated by Courier's semantics in dealing with same-priority mx's, but
given the current behavior, can anybody recommend any Courier configuration
tweaks to remedy this problem?

Thanks,
Carey