Craig White wrote: > ---- > A lot of residential bandwidth providers block smtp port traffic except > to their prescribed smtp servers which means you can't host a normal > mail domain on that type of connection for inbound mail and you must use > a their smtp server as a smarthost setup for outbound mail. > > You are not specific with your problem or the machine in question so we > have to deal with it on a theoretical level but if a system off lan > can't connect to your smtp system, then the likely problems are firewall > blocking smtp port on external access, or not forwarding if the firewall > is a separate system, or that your bandwidth provider is simply blocking > the traffic from getting through. > > There are some less likely causes such as sendmail MTA being deaf to > external interface (like you appear to have fixed already), bad routing > on the mail server and perhaps some others. > > Having the mx record set properly for your domain will be an issue for > mail delivery but you can/should test using telnet from remote location > which doesn't require dns to be functional or 'propagated' > > Craig > Hi Craig, There should be no issue with my ISP blocking SMTP. - By policy my ISP *allows* servers. They think it's just fine to run a mail server, as long as you don't misconfigure it. (If you are running an open relay, my ISP will take action, of course.) - The previous incarnation of this server worked just fine up until it died last month. That instance of sendmail (under FC3) sent and received, no problems. (The hardware on which the server was running was nine years old. One evening it suddenly stopped responding on its LAN interface, there was no signal on the video output, and the power light and disk drive light were lit up, no blinking. Power cycling, rebooting, turning off the power and unplugging overnight and then reconnecting and rebooting, nothing worked. Not worth trying to fix. RIP.) - Finally, as noted previously, the mail log indicates that spammers trying to deposit their trash to accounts on the *old* domain name used in the previous incarnation of the server have successfully opened SMTP connections with my new server. The spam has been rejected due to the old domain not being accepted by the new server. Clearly, my ISP is not blocking port 25 traffic to me. Thanks for the thought, anyway. Debbie
