Topic: Urgent: problem with SMTP

[Dan Williams]

Hi,
SME 5.5U2
Last week we started having troubles recieving external e-mail.
I looked into it, and found when running nmap, that port 25 was closed.
First thing we did after rebooting the server was checked things out at http://www.zmailer.org/mxverify.html .
Results as follows:
Testing MX server: mydomain.com
Address lookup did yield following ones:
IPv4 XXX.XX.X.XXX
Testing server at address: IPv4 XXX.XX.X.XXX
ERROR: Connect failure reason: Connection timed out

So I ran nmap again, and it said port 25 was open, and locally I could putty into it.
So, I used putty and connected to another server I have at another location, and tried to "telnet mail.mymailserver.com 25" and it yielded "Name or service not known, unknown host.

Searching on these forums yielded a post from Cyrus Bharda http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=15664.msg60304#msg60304
that explains the exact scenario we have, however we are still down.

To sum things up, we can send and recieve e-mail locally on our intranet.
We can send e-mail to the public internet.
People from the public internet can e-mail us, and it does not bounce, it just is not gettin in.
When we re-boot the server, and do a nmap, it shows port 25 as closed.
So as per CYRUS comments we do the following to get the port open:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/qmail start
/etc/rc.d/init.d/smtpfront-qmail start
but still get no incoming  there are no errors in the logs.

We are hooped, assistance on what to do, where to look is needed badly.
Dan

[Jon Blakely]

Dan,

Have you checked with your isp that they havn't started blocking port 25.

Jon

[Dan Williams]

Yes,
No Blocks other than antispoofing.
We have a static IP.
Dan

[alejandro]

ERROR: Connection Timed Out'' -- server wasn't reachable within tester's short 20 second timeout period;
this may be due to firewall blocking access to the primary servers with an intention that incoming email comes thru backup servers only. (More usual connection timeout is 5-10 minutes.)