Topic: Standalone Server - Mail delivery configuration problem

[Marco Hess]

I have a SME server (server-only) in a LAN of a small company that is there to support a development project in the engineering department with things like subversion, trac, redmine and cruise-control.

All those things work quite well, but I am going around in loops with regard to getting email delivered from that server to any of the email addresses of the people in the company. Email delivery to external addresses not related to the domain name of the company is fine.

The company does not use an internal email server and they all have accounts under their domain name with a server on the internet.

The problem is now that if I configure the domain of the server to be something like:

engineering.theirdomain.com and when it tries to deliver an email (e.g. a notification from the Trac or Redmine applications) to user@theirdomain.com, the receiving server complains that the originators domain engineering.theirdomain.com does not exist and it refuses the email. I have tried to make it deliver to an ISP mail server with authentication and it is still refused.

Then when I reconfigure the server to be just theirdomain.com, any mail to a user@theirdomain.com originating on the server, will be attempted to be delivered locally and because the user as such does not have an account on the server, it bounces also (it falls back to admin, which then is successfully forwarded to me on an external address).

So how do I get this server to successfully deliver email notifications to the local users?

Marco

[David Harper]

Do you have to use theirdomain.com within the office? Could you make it theirdomain.local?

If there's nothing on the outside that accesses the office network (except maybe a VPN or something), there may not be a need to have an actual valid Internet domain name.

I've set up SME Servers called somename.clientnet.local to deliver email via the ISP's SMTP server and it seems to work fine.

[Marco Hess]

I thought I tried that by giving it a subdomain name, but I tried your suggestion anyway. But I still have the problem that the external mail server denies the send request based on the sender name. Here is the piece of the qmail log:

Code: [Select]

@400000004939113d13c62c04 new msg 2295682
@400000004939113d13c8f6dc info msg 2295682: bytes 239 from <cruisecontrol@theirdomain.local> qp 4879 uid 50                 07
@400000004939113d146d7c0c starting delivery 2: msg 2295682 to remote marco.hess@gmail.com
@400000004939113d146f4ce4 status: local 0/10 remote 1/20
@400000004939113e0cff9d24 delivery 2: deferral: Connected_to_127.0.0.1_but_sender_was_rejected./Remote_host_said:_453_#4.1.8_Domain_of_sender_address_<cruisecontrol@theirdomain.local>_does_not_exist/
@400000004939113e0cffcc04 status: local 0/10 remote 0/20

I am not sure why it has the 127.0.0.1 in the Connected_to. though. Doesn't look like it actually talking to the remote server?

It is setup to connect to an ISP mail server with authentication.

[David Harper]

Okay. Try whatever your ISP domain name is.

For my home Internet connection, for example, it is nsw.optusnet.com.au, so my test server is xerxes.optusnet.com.au.

[Marco Hess]

Hhm, tried that but that is even worse. It got into a nasty mail loop due to the fact that when you reconfigure the server to ispdomain.tld it also configures mail.ispdomain.tld as a local address and that happens to be the ISP mail forwarding address that I needed to use.

And even after deleting the local host names, it still had a problem in that it could not resolve the mail.ispdomain.tld name because it is thinking that the ispdomain.tld is local to itself

I think the solution is more in what is discussed here:

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,42844.msg202796.html#msg202796

[CharlieBrady]

Then when I reconfigure the server to be just theirdomain.com, any mail to a user@theirdomain.com originating on the server, will be attempted to be delivered locally ...

It won't be if you use the Delegate Mail Server feature.

[stephen noble]

http://wiki.contribs.org/Email#How_do_I_get_my_e-mail_to_show_the_correct_From_Address