Exchange server not able to send outside emails

[JTKing]

I am trying to setup our exchange server so that it hosts our domain email now that we have a static IP address. I went through the Internet Mail Wizard in ESM and made sure my recipient policy had our domain as the primary smtp address. When I go to send a test message to my home account it goes into the Internet Mail SMTP Connector queue but then sits there and just retries. If I highlight that queue at the bottom it says, "The remote server did not repond to a connection attempt."

I get no errors in the event log. For the SMTP connector we are using DNS to route the address space and not a smart host. For the Default SMTP Virtual Server advanced delivery properties I have added some dns servers and also put in the rDNS name for our static ip in the masquerade domain field and put our public domain (not the local domain) in for the FQDN.

I'm at a loss for what to look at. Any ideas or suggestions for me? I haven't changed the MX records yet to point to our exchange box just for the fact that we can't send mail out yet.

 

[AndyPeck]

I would remove the DNS setting from the SMTP advance properties as this overrides the AD DNS setup and will make troubleshooting a 2 tier issue.

Assuming your exchagne is not a DC, its DNS should point to the DNS of your AD, which in might have forwarders settup. verify this works, ie when you browse from the EX server it works. if simple browsing works, drop to a command line and do an NSLOOKUP for MX records
NSlookup
set type=mx
bbc.co.uk (or thing else)

take note for an IP or FQDN of one of the MX servers and telnet on port 25 to it. and check you get the smtp banner

That should be enough for the mo

 

[asktheman]

have you made sure that your ISP has setup a MX record to route mail for your new exchange????

make sure that you have the correct priorty set within you IMC, Your firewall rules have been set, and the correct IP Address for your ISP's smtp server is inplace.

 

[JTKing]

Okay I removed the dns server from the advanced properties. The exchange server is a DC. I am able to browse from this server and I can also telnet into this server on port 25 and get the smtp banner.

I don't have the MX records pointing to this server to deliver mail to it yet as I wanted to make sure we could send mail out first. What do you mean ashtheman about the ISP's smtp server? We are gonna have the exchange server sent the mail out rather than the ISP's smtp server.

 

[AndyPeck]

JT

I meant, can you telnet to port 25 of someone else's smtp server, therefore confirming your server can make an outbound connection, as you are unable to send mail out this is a way of proving your ability to address a remote hosts

Andy

 

[JTKing]

yes I can telnet out to port 25 from our server to another email host.

 

[hexed]

What I would do is go download a packet sniffer like Ethereal and capture the packets on the network as you attempt to send a message.

The message should obviously be routed to your exchange server, then the exchange server should attempt to make a request to find the MX record of the dns routed smtp server. At which time, you should then see a packet attempting to connect to port 25 of the address of the domain that the email is attempting to be routed towards.

By using a packet sniffer, you can really narrow down the problem without doing all the guesswork.

enjoy

 

[AndyPeck]

I think you need to enable logging for SMTP on this server for a while and take a look at the error codes if any it kicks up