Forward to raw ip address

Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 4:51 pm Post subject: Forward to raw ip address

I am trying to forward mail that comes in on a domain to a second server which has a fixed ip but no domain name attached to it, for example tommy@123.456.789.123. The message is not received. I also find that if I use my regular email account to send mail directly that that account (with nethosted not in the loop at all) it is refused with a 550 that says "host unkown".

I guess three questions here, first am I trying something that is doomed to fail, second where are mail forwarding error messages sent in a nethosted context, and third is there workaround?

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

Colin,

Just verifying my theories on this now, I will report back shortly.

Thanks,

Andrew

Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 6:09 pm Post subject:

One of my sources tells me that abc@numbers is not allowed, it needs a dns operation. No explanation, but I guess it ties in with spam control. Probably nethosted is the same.

What I have done so far is to register the static IP with dyndns service, and I can now use the public subdomain name to send and check email on that account. But I have yet to see the test email come in, so I am not popping the champers yet.

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

Yes and in my experience a rDNS record is essential as most mailservers wont accept mail from a host without one.

Andrew

Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 6:33 pm Post subject:

If mail is being forwarded by my nethosted account to this other server, is there a way of making sure that when the other server does the rDNS that errors are minimized? I'm wondering if there is an entry that can go in the hosts file that will make sense to both mail sender and receiver.

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

As the mail will be originating from our server this wont be a problem as all of our servers have the correct rDNS entry.

Andrew

Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 1:27 pm Post subject:

Hmmm, my champers is still chilling on this one, mail forwarded from my mail account is still being rejected somewhere along the line. When I send directly to the account which now has a subdomain dns entry from dyndns I get the following message back:

----- Transcript of session follows -----
<colin@xxxxxx.dyndns.info>... Deferred: Connection refused by xxxxxxx.dyndns.info.
Warning: message still undelivered after 4 hours
Will keep trying until message is 3 days old

This server is behind a firewall and router which does NAT for port forwarding. All is well internally for mail which comes from php pages on the safe side of the firewall. All is also well with access to ftp and http servers behind the firewall from external sources, so I guess I should be looking for a port problem since postfix never sees anything.

Since this is a nethosted forum I just want to make sure that the correct ports are open for the mail forwarding from the nethosted account, so when the forwarder flings a copy of incoming mail to the other server, which port will it expect to see open at the router and the firewall?

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

Connection refused implies you firewall is either blocking port 25 or that there is no mail server listening on that port.

Andrew

Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 8:12 pm Post subject:

Thanks Andrew. Have verified that port 25 is indeed open, and also that reverse dns works just fine with respect to saturn at nethosted. But the mail is still refused.

The next thing I would like to check is the MX records. I'm thinking that I can do better than use dyndns in this context. I am wondering if it would be permissible or advisable to use the dns zone in the nethosted account to manage the ips on this other server? For example would it be possible to refer to this server (separate ip) as a subdomain of the main domain in the nethosted account? It would make the management of the domains a lot easier.

This is all new ground for me, I want to be sure that what I am thinking of is a bit better than nonsense and would not make Andrew's life more difficult.

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

Pointing a subdomain of your domain hosted here to a home server is permitted and advisable. Simply edit your DNS zone via WHM to add the A record needed.

You will need to add a higher priority MX record for your server to force mail sent to your domain name to be sent to your mail server instead of ours but I don't think this is what you are looking to achieve. You simply want to forward mail onto your own mailserver not redirect all mail.

Thanks,

Andrew

Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 9:21 pm Post subject:

Thank you Sir, that is excellent. I have created a subdomain in the dns zone and the web server on our home server is responding as expected.

Mail is still not going through, but at least I know that I have much better control over the MX entries through nethosted.

As you noted, the intention here is to have all mail delivered to the main domain (shared) server and only some accounts mail forwarded on receipt by the main domain. I created a mail.xxxxx.xxxx.xxxx sub-sub domain which I hope will take care of any ambiguity.

On to the next thing! Thanks again....

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

Glad to have helped!

Andrew

Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2007 9:21 am Post subject:

With the forwarding still not being received, I decided to turn the tables and try using fetchmail from the server which is supposed to log in and get mail from specific accounts and download locally. The advantage here is that I have more logging available locally.

I get two classes of errors, one is that it does not like the security cert., but that as I understand it is not fatal and is just a result of the shared server status. What is fatal however is the authentication, fetchmail thinks my password is entered incorrectly but admits it might be wrong. From my notification:

"The attempt to get authorization failed.
This probably means your password is invalid, but some servers have
other failure modes that fetchmail cannot distinguish from this
because they don't send useful error messages on login failure."

I have told fetchmail to use IMAP, this is what I use to fetch mail with my mail client, which has no problem with either the account on nethosted or my local server.

Anyone else seen this?

Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2007 9:31 am Post subject:

Apologies, this was my error, darn extended usernames. I forgot the @domain.name. Works just fine!

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