Topic: SME fails to receive email

[gabby]

About a week ago I attempted to make some configuration changes to my network. When they failed, I attempted to restore the everything back to the way it was. All was successful, except SME started to fail to receive email.

I have verifed the MX record and DNS settings. External (dynamic) IP address appears to be correct according to ifconfig.

Restarting SME and my cable modem have had no effect.

In the Email section of the SME documentation on the Wiki it indicates that receive errors are commonly due to SMTP configuration issues so I looked up the log file at /var/log/qsmtpd/current (and for the past several days). I found the point in time when it appears the smtp functions stopped functioning properly.

The log file shows the following repeatedly throughout the last week:

2010-12-24 21:47:31.554442500 3947 tls plugin (init): ciphers: HIGH
2010-12-24 21:47:31.623312500 3947 Listening on 0.0.0.0:25
2010-12-24 21:47:31.624270500 3947 Running as user qpsmtpd, group qpsmtpd
2010-12-24 21:47:31.624483500 3947 Initializing spool_dir
2010-12-24 21:47:31.670541500 3947 Permissions on spool_dir /var/spool/qpsmtpd/ are not 0700
2010-12-24 21:47:31.671166500 3947 size_threshold set to 0

I suspect that the "Listening on 0.0.0.0:25" message is a significant clue to why this is broken, but I don't know what to do about it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. We have been unable to receive email for a week!

[gabby]

I just found this thread in the forums: http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=7557.0

it seems to address the issue, but my problem deviates from the HOWTO because when I probe my ports, port 25 is already open.

Again thank you for any assistance!

[gabby]

Well I seem to have fixed the issue. I created a Port forwarding rule for Port 25 to Port 25 on the localhost. I instantly received queued messages.

I still don't know why this happened... Any thoughts?

Best Regards

[CharlieBrady]

I suspect that the "Listening on 0.0.0.0:25" message is a significant clue to why this is broken, ...

No, that's perfectly normal.

[CharlieBrady]

Well I seem to have fixed the issue. I created a Port forwarding rule for Port 25 to Port 25 on the localhost. I instantly received queued messages.

I still don't know why this happened... Any thoughts?

Something which should have worked didn't work. Please report your problem in detail via the bug tracker, and we'll attempt to work out why.

[DanB35]

I'm also having trouble sending or receiving email since I moved the server a couple of weeks ago.  It was moved to a new ISP, so my first suspicion is that the new ISP is blocking port 25, though they say that is not the case.

Attempts to send mail out from my SME server are rejected (about a week later) with the following:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at familybrown.org.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<xxxxx@me.com>:
Sorry, I wasn't able to establish an SMTP connection. (#4.4.1)
I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

Attempts to send mail to the server bounce (again, about a week later) with the following:

Message-id: <a2b20f6c-6b51-cf2d-d980-8118bb29c40c@me.com>
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2010 12:09:38 +0000 (GMT)
From: Dan Brown <danb35@me.com>
To: Dan Brown <dan@familybrown.org>
Subject: Test

Your message is being returned; it has been enqueued and undeliverable for
4 days to the following recipients:

Recipient address: dan@familybrown.org
Reason: unable to deliver this message after 4 days


Delivery attempt history for your mail:

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 17:23:34 -0800 (PST)
TCP active open: Failed connect() 68.209.142.228:25 Error: Connection timed out

(with the last message repeating several times over that 4-day period).

A port scan on my server from grc.com lists port 25 as "stealth", which would explain the connection failures.  Running netstat on my server returns this:

Code: [Select]

[root@e-smith dan]# netstat -a -n | grep :25
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:25                  0.0.0.0:*                   LISTEN   
Are there things I should check on my server, or does this behavior indicate an ISP issue?

[CharlieBrady]

Are there things I should check on my server, or does this behavior indicate an ISP issue?

It indicates an ISP issue (or a DNS issue for inbound, if the IP address of the attempted connections is wrong).

FWIW, I get "no route to host" if I try to connect to 68.209.142.228. Doesn't look like that IP address is connected to the Internet.

PS, Hi Dan!