Topic: email client access over the internet

[macca]

all
i currently have a e-smith 5.5 (upgraded from 5.1.2 today(good or bad?)) with a static ip at our main site.our mx record points to the server all the clients sat behind the sme can send and recieve mails intenally and externally with no problems, using outlook2000 and outlook express 5-6.
heres where the fun starts, we have a few remote sites with 7-8 clients at each sat behind smoothwall firewalls, that perform NAT. 1 machine on each site has a VPN connection to our sme box to allow local file sharing access
(tried getting all the clients to do VPN connections, until i found out it wont work that way ;0(  )
this then leaves the other 6-7 clients at the remote sites wanting to use email, so from each client i can ping our external ip of the sme box, and also the mail.xxxxxx.co.uk of our sme box. so i though okay ill point the remaining machines email clients to mail.xxxxx.co.uk. they can connect and authenticate ok, only problem is that they can only send/recieve emails to and from internal recipients, they can recieve from external address's- whenever they try to send to external recipients the sme box bounces the emails back saying recipient not in my list (thats in outlook express) outlook just gets them returned saing undeliverable

n e ideas?
im baffled, u may of guessed im still learning about sme

is it something to do with local networks?? do i need to point the sme at a secondary mail server?

many many thanks

[Paul Crookes]

have you tried a vpn ??? it sounds like it is setup wrong. i have sme server at head office and at remote office 4 workstaions, they all logon ok and email no probs. And i have my laptop as a road Warrior. all with no problems. the only thing is it does not work in a NATed isp.

Paul Crookes
aka Pukka

[Nate]

By default e-smith doensn't allow relaying--it sounds like thats what you are trying to do.  Use SMTP on the external IP address to send mail to external addresses.  You don't want to enable relaying, then anyone(spammers) could use your server to send out email.  The best solution IMO on 5.1.2 is using pop-before-smtp created by Nathan Fowler(search the forum).  It allows external address to send mail after they authenticate via pop mail or imap mail for 10 minutes(you can change the amount of time allowed).  However, it won't work with 5.5 since 5.5 uses mailfront.  I haven't heard how to do the smtp authentication with 5.5, though it should be possible with mailfront.  Hope this helps.