May I ask to confirm that this issue is still current and causing problems for mail managers?

I ask because we recently changed ISPs and the change of circumstances obliged us to use the End-to-End client instead of the Relaying client. Within a short time, we encountered the "multiple destination domains per transaction is unsupported" problem when sending traffic from the list server. Currently, my workaround involves splitting lists into chunks to separate suspect domains, so they don't clash and provoke the error from Google's mail servers. Obviously, this is cumbersome and time-consuming. I'm asking because perhaps the problem has gone away and I don't need to carry on doing this ;)

I believe Exim has an option "multi_domain" to tweak the sending client, to cope with Google, and sendmail is talking about something similar. Does anyone have a suitable workaround for Mercury? While people have strong opinions about Google setting standards of their own and expecting the world to fall into line, I wonder if having a consolidation switch in the SMTP Client settings might prove useful in several ways (Consolidate at most "X" messages).

Bob. 

We us our Mercury Mail Server as a Listserv only.  After Google made a change to their system in May we started getting the Multiple Destination Domain errors.  Google readily admits that they are the cause of this issue and their solution is to require anyone sending to a domain that uses Google for email to send to a single domain per connection.  All of the domains MX records resolve to ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.  So is there a setting in Mercury to send mail to one domain even if there are multiple domains on a server?

 thanks

[quote user="awaterman"]

We us our Mercury Mail Server as a Listserv only.  After Google made a change to their system in May we started getting the Multiple Destination Domain errors.  Google readily admits that they are the cause of this issue and their solution is to require anyone sending to a domain that uses Google for email to send to a single domain per connection.  All of the domains MX records resolve to ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.  So is there a setting in Mercury to send mail to one domain even if there are multiple domains on a server?[/quote]

Is this the problem affecting Virginmedia/Blueyonder etc. domains?

There's no setting in MercuryE to handle non-standard SMTP servers like these at Google.  Hopefully they will see sense in the end and change back to the settings before May.

If you do an NSLOOKUP on the MX record for the domain and it returns the ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM group of servers, yep it is what is affecting them.Or are these listserv providers?  In that case, yes it is what is causing them problems.  But it does not look like google is going to see sense.  it has been going on for nearly 3 months and they are giving a form email in response that is cryptic enough that most of the people handling email for the schools I deal with couldn't tell if I needed change something or they needed to change something. 

Are you finding that they get re-queued and sometimes go on a retry? The 4xx error is a temporary failure, but there's no doubt Google are making up new rules with this one.

Yes, after failure they get re-qued but because there are so many failures heading to google, they continue to fail.  What I did to get around it was to put entries in my Hosts file to point the ASPMX cluster of domain names to the SMTP.GMAIL.COM address they gave as an alternative.  Basically any domain that wanted to resolve the problem could change their MX record to point to the SMTP address instead of the ASPMX address.  So with host file entries, basically I pointed everything to that other server.  It seems to have worked to resolve the issue for me, but overall Google has a serious problem that will only get worse with their "The World has to change because we said so" attitude.

[quote user="awaterman"]It seems to have worked to resolve the issue for me, but overall Google has a serious problem that will only get worse with their "The World has to change because we said so" attitude.[/quote]

I agree 101%... the issue is still raging on internal "Google Groups" but as of the present time, no-one with any technical knowledge in authority at Google seems even to understand that a problem exists!  In line with the arrogance outlined by awaterman, any technical information sent to "postmaster" at Google domains just results in a bland boilerplate response that points you to Google consumer help or to Google Groups.  There are loyal enthusiasts on Google Groups who state that they have escalated the issue but even their patience seems to be wearing thin.

You can find discussions on the relevant Google groups if you Google (ha!) the error message "Multiple destination domains per transaction is unsupported" - but the one thing that seems clear is that it ain't going to be fixed any time soon... :(

Ah!  I thought I couldn't post links but try here and here...