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Outgoing verification problems

Macs R We
  • Edited

Ran into a problem today where my server refused to send mail to users at a particular host. Regardless of recipient ID, I always received the following message from Apple Mail:

Cannot send message using the server [my-own-server]
...
The server response was: Cannot deliver mail to name@domain. The accountor [sic] domain may not exist, they may be blacklisted, or missing the proper dnsentries [sic].

However, I could send the same email to the same recipients with no errors, using a spare account I have at Yahoo.

Since it was an error from my local server and not a bounce from the target server, my first thought was that ones of our servers wasn't processing VRFY correctly.

The remote administrator demonstrated to me that the remote server always answers VRFY with "252 2.0.0 name@domain" which translates to "Cannot VRFY user, but will accept message and attempt delivery." (I don't know how common this response is, all I know is that I've never seen a similar failure on my end before.)

I went into WHM Exim Configuration and searched for "verif" to see if there was something I could tweak. All I found were controls for verifying the validity of incoming mail senders.

I can't find anything that would tune the outgoing verification procedure or its response to 252. Any suggestions?

Comments

4 comments

Date Votes
  • cPRex Jurassic Moderator

    Hey there!  So you're saying this message came from the cPanel server and is not a bounce from the remote system?  Could you share the full entry from /var/log/exim_mainlog when you try and send the message?

    0
  • Macs R We

    2024-10-22 13:11:48 SMTP connection from [63.156.219.125]:55469 (TCP/IP connection count = 3)

    2024-10-22 13:11:49 H=63-156-219-125.dia.static.qwest.net (smtpclient.apple) [63.156.219.125]:55469 X=TLS1.2:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:256 CV=no F=<me@libertyhaven.com> A=dovecot_plain:me@libertyhaven.com rejected RCPT <treasurer@cmass.org>: The mail server could not deliver mail to treasurer@cmass.org.  The account or domain may not exist, they may be blacklisted, or missing the proper dns entries.

    2024-10-22 13:11:49 SMTP connection from 63-156-219-125.dia.static.qwest.net (smtpclient.apple) [63.156.219.125]:55469 D=0s closed by QUIT

     

    0
  • quietFinn

    Te MX record of that domain is wrong, MX record can't be an IP address, it must be a hostname.

    Some mail servers may accept that, but they shouldn't.

     

    1
  • Macs R We

    Thanks for the analysis. I've let the remote admin know.

    0

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