connections failing on SMTP port

Question

Level 1

14 points

connections failing on SMTP port

I'm seeing something odd on my OS X server system WRT email.

Everything was going along fine for a few months, and now I'm seeing *no* successful SMTP connections from outside my network.

The firewall hasn't changed, and I'm seeing the incoming connections. They just never get past the SYN ACK part of the connection setup.

remote ---> SYN --> server

remote <-- SYN ACK <-- server

And that's pretty much it.

If the firewall was blocking the connections I would expect not to even see the SYN.

Web, DNS etc work fine, so I know there's no routing problem exterior to my network.

I checked the client restrictions and inet interfaces entries in main.cf, but nothing done there appeared to affect the connection. Right now inet_interfaces is set to all, and the client restrictions is the standard set -- permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org permit

I tried setting client restrictions to just "permit" and it didn't help.

I did just upgrade the server. That might have been a mistake, but it's done now. Apple's had some pretty seriously screwed up server upgrade in the past...

Has anyone seen anything like what I'm describing?

Any ideas about where to go next on this?

Thanks for any help.

Kevin

Posted on Mar 23, 2013 9:54 PM

Reply

Answer 1

kevinbrock Author

Level 1

14 points

Mar 24, 2013 9:01 PM in response to kevinbrock

Some more information... Web sites on the system work fine. I can get at them from outside my network without a problem. It's *just* SMTP that's not working. There's nothing on the firewall that would interfere with port 25 any more than it would with port 80.

The system is running OS X 10.8.3 (12D78), Server 2.2.1 (12T162)

All the mail services claim they're up...

Reply

Answer 2

Jun 17, 2013 2:46 AM in response to kevinbrock

I am having the exact same issue. I bought a MacBook Pro and the Mail SMPT for outgoing mail did not work. I installed thunderbird and then updated the the OS it all stopped again. I have only done two new things - 1. updated my OS to OS X 10.8.4 (12E55) and 2)synced my iphone to the new macbook - any advice would be great as i can't send emails . . .

Cheers

Don

Reply

Answer 3

Jun 17, 2013 5:31 AM in response to donofromqld

donofromdld: your issue appears to be quite different than the earlier thread; you are not likely running an SMTP server here, and you're probably not running OS X Server software here. OS X Server (this community) is an add-on package for the OS X client software that you're probably running, and that adds a mail server, a DNS server, and various other features.

As for your predicament, please run the Connection Doctor that's available in the Mail.app client menus, select the testing details, and then re-run the connection test (to get the details of the errors displayed in the details), then — if you can't sort out the error from what's shown with the connection error details — please post the anonymized output of the connection tests. (I'd encourage starting your own thread, since you don't want your question buried over here in the OS X Server community.)

In general, getting OS X client mail working involves getting the receive-path and send-path credentials, server host name and settings to match the mail ISP requirements, and those requirements vary by ISP.

Reply