Email forwarders not working with smarthost configured
Hi All,
Giving background before coming to the problem direct.
I migrated away from a typical webserver to Azure. I find port 25 blocked globally on Microsoft. Initially there was zero communication to and from exim. I read online and found workaround to configure Smarthost. My smarthost is google workspace and it seems its relaying emails originating from websites and emails coming from other domains to my cpanel mailboxes perfectly.
Until i recently discovered that email forwarders are not receiving any emails!
I see in exim logs the message id gets completed for each forwarder email
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Paste from log:
2023-01-16 04:32:46 cwd=/var/spool/exim 3 args: /usr/sbin/exim -Mc 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi
2023-01-16 04:32:46 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi SMTP connection identification D=domain.com O=sender@domain.com E=recipient1@gmail.com M=1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi U=cpanelacc ID=1029 B=redirect_resolver
2023-01-16 04:32:46 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi Sender identification U=cpanelacc D=domain.com S=sender@domain.com
2023-01-16 04:32:46 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi SMTP connection outbound 1673843566 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi domain.com recipient1@gmail.com
2023-01-16 04:32:46 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi SMTP connection identification D=domain.com O=sender@domain.com E=recipient3@gmail.com M=1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi U=cpanelacc ID=1029 B=redirect_resolver
2023-01-16 04:32:46 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi Sender identification U=cpanelacc D=domain.com S=sender@domain.com
2023-01-16 04:32:46 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi SMTP connection outbound 1673843566 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi domain.com recipient3@gmail.com
2023-01-16 04:32:46 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi SMTP connection identification D=domain.com O=sender@domain.com E=recipient2@gmail.com M=1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi U=cpanelacc ID=1029 B=redirect_resolver
2023-01-16 04:32:46 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi Sender identification U=cpanelacc D=domain.com S=sender@domain.com
2023-01-16 04:32:46 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi SMTP connection outbound 1673843566 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi domain.com recipient2@gmail.com
2023-01-16 04:32:47 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi => it R=virtual_user T=dovecot_virtual_delivery C="250 2.0.0 8Df5AW/TxGOUOwAARBevbQ Saved"
2023-01-16 04:32:49 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi => recipient2@gmail.com (sender@domain.com) R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp H=smtp-relay.gmail.com [64.233.188.28] TFO X=TLS1.3:TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256 CV=yes C="250 2.0.0 OK 1673843569 i5-20020a170902e48500b00192c4055e4asm1643242ple.90 - gsmtp"
2023-01-16 04:32:49 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi => recipient3@gmail.com (sender@domain.com) R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp H=smtp-relay.gmail.com [64.233.187.28] TFO X=TLS1.3:TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256 CV=yes C="250 2.0.0 OK 1673843569 cl8-20020a0566383d0800b003a150b13a18sm296566jab.65 - gsmtp"
2023-01-16 04:32:49 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi => recipient1@gmail.com (sender@domain.com) R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp H=smtp-relay.gmail.com [108.177.125.28] TFO X=TLS1.3:TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256 CV=yes C="250 2.0.0 OK 1673843569 y2-20020a4aea22000000b004f51dfdf754sm87791ood.17 - gsmtp"
2023-01-16 04:32:49 1pHHAq-0003xK-Bi Completed
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My forwarders recepients are gmail, yahoo and few other common emails.
So coming to problem:
Emails from outside land to the main cpanel mailbox but not on forwarder mailboxes.
PS: I moved sites from old host to new host using Transfer Tool.
the domain is listed in
/etc/localdomain
Thanks,
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I noticed i did receive emails for sometime while i performed following commands in some sequence. /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/suspendacct cpanelacc --force /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/unsuspendacct cpanelacc --force then whmapi1 unset_manual_mx_redirects domain=domain.com whmapi1 unset_all_service_proxy_backends username=cpanelacc I dont recall in which sequence i performed these commands but infact forwarders started working after that for that particular domain and doing them again in all domains stopped for all domains. Thanks, 0 -
Hey there! The details in the specific log entries you provided don't tell me much, as it seems to indicate things are working well. Can you search your /var/log/exim_mainlog file for the following string and let me know if you see it? local_parts check lookup or other defer
If so, you could be experiencing the following issue:0 -
grepping for the string did not result anything, no occurrence in logs. I am keep testing various combinations to narrow down exact situation. Here is one observation i made: I have: email1@cpanelhosted.com with forwarder set to f1@gmail.com, f2@gmail.com, f3@gmail.com while i send an email from any outside email like mymail@personalmail.com to email1@cpanelhosted.com, everything trigger fine in logs but none of the 3 gmails receive any email, only email1@cpanelhosted.com receives it. While i send from email2@cpanelhosted.com (webmail) to email1@cpanelhosted.com, everything again triggers in logs same lines but all the 3 gmails receive it along with email1@cpanelhosted.com! this is super confusing to me. 0 -
Do you happen to have mail archiving enabled on that domain? 0 -
mail archiving is not enabled. its set to off in tweak settings. 0 -
I have created a ticket and granted server access. ticketid: 94522419 0 -
Thanks for that - I'm following along with that ticket on my end now also. 0 -
Out of curiosity, I wanted to know how do emails normally work on Azure or any other cloud platform like AWS that offer cPanel image. They all have port 25 outgoing blocked but they do allow port 25 incoming. I have read across major relay players like AWS SES, SMTP2Go, they all assure mailbox delivery in and out of server mailbox but none of them are welcoming on email forwarding. I got SMTP2Go to test out if that can resolve. I faced the same issue with it, emails delivery till mailboxes went fine but not to its forwarders. SMTP2Go support said this, "It sounds like the plugin is working exactly as expected and that the cPanel forwarders are not functioning correctly. We have no influence on the forwarders, that is entirely a cPanel/WHM issue." Forwarders are primary requirement for our websites. 0 -
When our team checked the server, we found that messages are reaching Gmail normally. Are you still seeing issues with the forwarded addresses? 0 -
I moved out all sites out of my cpanel server. I have kept a domain or two that doesn't have much email traffic on it. Email issues we couldn't afford. I don't have any logs to confirm but I have a gut feeling that says gmail perhaps rate limits messages without error but again I get baffled as why emails originating from webmail always delivered out but forwarders recipients never delivered. Or gmail sees forwarder messages differently and rate-limits them? I have more questions than answers so moving sites back to typical webserver where port 25 is open seemed practical. I will keep searching for this and will see if something gives me any direction. Also SRS angle hasnt been looked at still. 0 -
@hello2029 - in general, if you have a ticket open, that's going to get you better answers since we'll have direct access to the server. I did see in this case we reviewed the log and found this entry showing the forwarding failure: REDACTED Details directly from Gmail about that specific error can be found here: 0 -
Dear @cPRex and All, - Please kindly review and remove my domain name from your previous response. It is not advisable to disclose specific information like that publicly.
- Currently, I am using WHM and cPanel. The reason my IP is being rejected by Google, Yahoo, and others is because it falls within the IP ranges offered for dial-up, DSL, or other broadband access.
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@hello2029 - I did anonymize the domain names - is there a portion I missed? Unfortunately we aren't able to reach out to third-party tools to work with them to see if the issue could be on their end. You're welcome to try that, but that's outside the scope of our support. 0 -
@hello2029 - I did anonymize the domain names - is there a portion I missed? Unfortunately we aren't able to reach out to third-party tools to work with them to see if the issue could be on their end. You're welcome to try that, but that's outside the scope of our support.
The server log mentioned above still contains the domain name and server IP address.0 -
I've just removed that entire log now. 0
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