Topic: Surgemail: Can receive messages but cant send messages

[bjohnson]

I am trying to setup an email server. I have installed surgemail and set up a user account. The account can receive messages. however I can not get messages to successfully send out. I get the following error message


Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[glsmith]

I've never used this server but one glaringly obvious thing is it does not like the IP 127.0.0.1 ... seems it wants a domain name ... can you make it somedomain.com that will not spit up an "Invalid Domain" error

30 13:34:16[171] Failed 127.0.0.1 <brian.johnson@yourmiddlebrook.com> <bjohnson@qk4.com> 773<475057a8.163.e9c.7931@yourmiddlebrook.com> "[127.0.0.1] Invalid Domain (qk4.com)"

30 13:27:18[169] Failed 127.0.0.1 <brian.johnson@yourmiddlebrook.com> <brianpjohnson@btes.tv> 785 <47505605.2bb.146c.26333@yourmiddlebrook.com> "[127.0.0.1] Invalid Domain (btes.tv)"

I'm not sure just which end it is looking for the domain? On one hand, it may be having a problem looking up qk4.com and btes.tv .. do you have it configured to your/ISPs DNS servers? I have to configure mine with the IPs of my DNS servers.

On the other hand, it may want to your resolved WAN IP (for instance I am at netblock-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.dslextreme.com). It looks to me like it might be trying to sort of check the domain name of where the email is actually originating from. Cryptic error message.

Now this could be in how you have your mail client setup. If the SMTP server setting in your client is set to 127.0.0.1, one may get away with "localhost," at least this pseudo hostname will resolve (to 127.0.0.1 of course) cause of the Windoze hosts file. If it doesn't like that I'd say configure it to your email servers hostname which looks like yourmiddlebrook.com or qk4.com ... hopefully then the server will pick up your WAN hostname as in my example above and look it up.

An example, if I login to mine using an smpt server hostname of <=> it sees
127.0.0.1 <=> 127.0.0.1
localhost <=> computername (not sure why exactly)
mydomain.com <=> netblock-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.dslextreme.com

8 or so edits later I think I said what I wanted/

[bjohnson]

glsmith,

Thanks for your reply, I think your probably right but I'm still not sure how to fix the problem.

seems like i need to be sending out my wan ip instead of 127.0.0.1

seems as though the recieving server is checking the ip with the dns lookup and they dont match because its using the 127.0.0.1 instead of the wan IP.

I only have one line in my host file

127.0.0.1 Local host

In Surgemail I have the imaphost and the smtphost set to 127.0.0.1
which is what they defaulted to, i.e. I haven't changed them.

any thoughts on what I need to change? do I need to change my host file or do I need to change my Surgemail settings?

Thanks for your help!

[glsmith]

SurgeMail needs a DNS server to send to remote email addresses. SurgeMail will typically use the default operating system settings but if outbound mail is not getting sent you may need to specify this manually on the Global settings page. You would use the IP address of whatever upstream DNS server you would normally use eg: your ISP DNS server.

[bjohnson]

GLSmith,

GOT IT!

That was it, I had entered an IP for the DNS Server, but it was the wrong IP. I used the IP of the DNS Server for where I registered the domian name ns1.sitelutions.com. Once I changed this to mp ISP's DNS Server, bingo it worked.

I warned you that I didn't have a clue.

Thanks again for your help! A big relief to finally have the thing running!

[glsmith]

Glad to hear you got it working

G