Why Are My E-mails Bouncing?

[JohnSaunders]

I have a dedicated server running Red Hat 7.2 with Sendmail and Webmin and I am trying to set it up so I can send/receive email from Outlook to an account set up on the server. I've followed the steps on Rackspace.com's support site at:

http://support.rackspace.com/cgi-bi...15=&2716=&57=search&58=&25=7&3=LINUX-*-* mail

but it isn't working. Anytime I try to send an e-mail from my ISP's POP3 account to the one I set up on my server, ends up bouncing back.

I a domain name pointing to an IP addresses on my dedicated server. The main IP address of the server does not have a domain name pointing to it yet, becasue I'm waiting to set everything up correctly before I point the domain to it. Everything else is working fine, HTTP, SSH, and FTP. Here is what I have in my DNS for another domain name that is pointing to the server:

IN MX 10 mail.domain.com.
$ORIGIN domain.com.
mail IN A 209.15.XX.XXX

I have the domain entered in the Host Addresses section under in Hardware in Webmin. Under Address Mapping in Webmin I have myname@domain.com entered as the address and my username 'website' as the address.

Can somebody tell me why my e-mails aren't being received on my server? Am I missing something? I can send emails out through scripts I have set up, I just can't receive them when they are sent through Outlook. Do I need to install some other server like POP3? How about a SMTP server for sending e-mails out from the accounts?

Any help would be greatly apprecieated. I've spent the past 4 hours trying to get this to work and haven't gotten anywhere.


Regards,

John

 

[wolf2x]

I'll give this a shot.

Try telnetting to port 25 on the mail server. You should be able to find some info on the net about testing your Sendmail installation from telnet.

From the way it sounds, you will probably not be able to connect when you first try to connect through telnet. You do need pop as well as smtp (or imap).

Then, go into /etc/xinetd.d and "enable" the ones that are needed.

Try the telnet tests again.

 

[Valcor]

POP3 is for collection only I thought. You wouldn't require a POP3 server to send mail. That is what SMTP is for. What error message are you getting? Saying it bounced can mean anything... mail loops back to me (bad MX?)... user unknown... host refusing connections etc etc. If you give details of the error message, I'm sure it'll be easier to work out. Once you've established how to get mail to your server, then you can work on pop3 for collection via Outlook (or other email client), or you can use mail programs on the server such as pine.

--
Jon

 

[JohnSaunders]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for your help. I ended up fixing the problem I was having. The issue lied in the fact that sendmail was only answering loopback connections. In the /etc/sendmail.cf file, the following line was change.

O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp,Addr=1270.0.1, Name=MTA

was modified to

O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp,Addr=0.0.0.0, Name=MTA.

It's strange that this was a default setting on my server and out of all the sendmail tutorials I read through, none of them mentioned anything about this causing a problem.


John

 

[Valcor]

That is a default sendmail configuration on Redhat to stop open relays, and allow relaying for localhost only. You can just put dnl in front of the same line in /etc/mail/sendmail.mc then remake it (instructions are at the top of the same file). --
Jon

 

[JohnSaunders]

Is everything the way I have it configured as I posted it above or do I need to make the changes you mentioned? Can spammers relay mail through my server the way I have it?

Should I be using APOP to be more secure since the password isn't really encrypted with regular POP email?

Also, the e-mail account I created has the same username and password for ftp and ssh. Is the OK or should I make it different?


Jeff

 

[Valcor]

I've not really played with the default config much... I just jumped right in, and added a load of allowed relay's (like the internal network), and blocked anything I know were spammers.

Use APOP if you feel you need to. As for setting up different passwords for different services, I didn't realise you could. SSH is fine, as it is encrypted, if you want to go a little more secure you could use SFTP, and APOP.

I think you can test your server's state on an open relay site... I think

http://www.ordb.org

or something like that. --
Jon