Problems receiving email in Exchange 5.5 from several outside vendors

[astra1200s]

I am running exchange 5.5 and currently have 3 vendors who cant email us.

First vendor receives a bounce back stating action: delay
status:4.4.0 (delievery attempt failed)
Apparent cause of delievery fail:
Attempts to connect to the remote server have failed.


Second vendor receives a similar error.
Failed to send to identified host,
Could not connect to Host xxxx.com: unable to connect to server.

Third vendor is running exchange 5.5 and the email to us is queued in their ims. It states in the detail menu screen that host unreachable.

We run a velociraptor firewall and behind the firewall is a spam/email content filter and the emails are forwarded into our exchange server.

Any help deciphering the bounceback messages will be appreciated.

 

[parkermms]

I don't think it is an Exchange problem, open port 13 on your firewall and have them try again.


-Mark

 

[astra1200s]

What is port 13?

 

[parkermms]

If this doesn't fix it or you are already setup this way, I had a customer once that I had to add them manually on the connection tab of the IMS under message delivery click the specify by e-mail domain and add their domain and ip address. It fixed this for them, I think the problem was with the way their ISP had their firewalls setup.

-mark

 

[parkermms]

It is an authorization port, I read your post again and if they are on exchange also you probably don't need port 13 open, the problem I encountered was a unix machine with sendmail, somehow it uses this port to verify the sender address.

-Mark

 

[astra1200s]

The vendors use novell groupwise and exchange. I will follow your suggestion in adding them to the IMS. Ill keep you informed.

Thanks for the help.

 

[astra1200s]

Mark,

Are you stating that the vendors should add their own domain and ip to IMS on their servers?

 

[parkermms]

You need to add the ip address and the domain name on yours. I know it seems weird but that will probably fix it.

-Mark

 

[parkermms]

Your right and I am wrong this works the other way around when you can not send mail to their domain. Sorry for the runaround. Sounds like a DNS issue on there end though did you check into the ip port 13 (AUTH) on the firewall. We run a Watchguard firebox and this did need to opened up for some clients.

-Mark

 

[astra1200s]

Adding our domain and IP to the IMS connection tab didnt work. Do you have any other suggestions?


Thanks,
Rich

 

[astra1200s]

Ill check into port 13.

 

[astra1200s]

Can you be more specific to what protocol port 13 I should look into. I can define tcp,ip,udp for port 13.

 

[astra1200s]

By default tcp port 13 is the day time protocol.

 

[astra1200s]

Im sorry. I didnt read your message clearly. IP protocol.

 

[parkermms]

Sorry,
I am having an off day its port 113, I should research this a little more before I open my big fat fingers.

-Mark

Clip from Watchguards website-

Description: Some SMTP servers use the port 113 Authentication service to verify the identity of the sending host. If your Firebox or SOHO is denying port 113 (as it will by default) these servers may reject the mail outright, or there may be a delay of up to a minute while the server attempts to authenticate the sender.

 

[astra1200s]

I havent received test emails from the vendors yet. They probably left work. Ill work on the issue next week. Thanks for the help. Keep in touch.

Rich