Qmailers,

Very interesting problem going on here. Installed Qmail on Redhat 8.0 and I am able receive mail from remote addresses as well as local users. The problem is it just wont send out email to remote users. When I checked the smtpd logs, it tells me

Sorry: I couldnt establish an SMTP connection.

Here is a picture of what I am seeing:

local user to locat user: Success
remote user to local user: Success
local user to remote user: Fail

This Qmail Server is running behind an IPTABLEs firewall and I can do ping and nslookups (using the mx switch) and connect to the remote mail servers but it just wont send mail out? I also have the correct entries in my DNS server indicating this box as the mail exhanger.

Has anyone experienced this ? Any ideas where I should start looking to fix this problem and what modules control connecting to a remote SMTP transaction.

Thanks Guys.

Sending mail from a local address to a remote address is called "RELAYING"

Check the rules you have to allow specific users or authorised users to RELAY

Thanks peter_robb,

Checked that . This is a copy of what my tcp.smtp file reads:

127.:allow,RELAYCLIENT=""
192.168.1.:allow,RELAYCLIENT=""
:allow


and this is started as an option with the qmailctl script. So this should allow me to send email from any of my LAN clients with the 192.168.1.* address right ? Funny thing is it doesnt even send from the mail server itself (127.0.0.1) which is listed also in the tcp.smtp file listed above.

Double checked and rebuilt the cdb files but still no go. Any other suggestions ?

Thanks Man.

Hey Guys,

Figured out why it wasnt sending to remote address. My firewall was dropping the packets. I opened up the ports 25 and voila.

I should have tried telnet to port 25 from the command line to a remote mail server (Duh!!) and that would have pointed me in the right direction .


So all I did to test was
telnet mail.yahoo.com 25 :

And once i got the response back, boom all my messages in my queue started going out. Just thought i would say what happened in case it helps someone.

Thanks Guys.