Multible Problems receiving and sending E-Mails

[JbS]

Hi there,
It seems to be E-Mail-Problem-Week.
I'm following up diffrent Problems. Not one seems to have to do with an other, but I will still list them here to see if you can help me:

1. Sending E-Mail to a certen Domain we get the Error
"
Mar 26 13:03:58 postfix/smtp 70C2280208: host <target-Mail-Host>[<ip of targethost] refused to talk to me: 554 IP:<our public IP> - A problem occurred. (Ask your postmaster for help or to contact <email-address> to clarify.)

2. Quite offten I find following Error-message in the log
"Mar 27 14:19:15postfix/smtpdlost connection after DATA from <host>[IP-Adress]
Mostly the Hosts are 'unknown'.
Is this a problem I have to whach or not??

3. Receiving E-Mails
We have of and on had the situation that our Users are expecting an e-mail. The sender has confirmed that he/she has sent it and gets an error latter on that our e-mail server can not be contacted.
But in the same periode of time we receive and send many e-mails to all kind of firms!
So my guess is that it's doing some kind of lookup, doesn't like us and doesen't even start contacting us.
I know we do not yet have a SPF-DNS-Entry. We would love to make one, but out of lake of knowledge he have not done so.
Can somebody give me a understandable explanation or link, so we can correct this issue.

Mabe the oposit Server has an other problem with us. Is there a good way to check??

I know there quite a few questions, and not always easy to answer, but I would apreciate any help!

Regards

JbS

 

[tom]

Hi,

Hi there,
It seems to be E-Mail-Problem-Week.
I'm following up diffrent Problems. Not one seems to have to do with an other, but I will still list them here to see if you can help me:

1. Sending E-Mail to a certen Domain we get the Error
"
Mar 26 13:03:58 postfix/smtp 70C2280208: host <target-Mail-Host>[<ip of targethost] refused to talk to me: 554 IP:<our public IP> - A problem occurred. (Ask your postmaster for help or to contact <email-address> to clarify.)

the message is clear: the host refused to talk to you. try telnet to this host (telnet IP 25) for debugging.

2. Quite offten I find following Error-message in the log
"Mar 27 14:19:15postfix/smtpdlost connection after DATA from <host>[IP-Adress]
Mostly the Hosts are 'unknown'.
Is this a problem I have to whach or not??

points to a network problem somewhere, this can happen quite often and most time you can ignore it. if you got a problem sending/receiving emails to a specific domain, analyze it via the message tracking center.

3. Receiving E-Mails
We have of and on had the situation that our Users are expecting an e-mail. The sender has confirmed that he/she has sent it and gets an error latter on that our e-mail server can not be contacted.
But in the same periode of time we receive and send many e-mails to all kind of firms!
So my guess is that it's doing some kind of lookup, doesn't like us and doesen't even start contacting us.
I know we do not yet have a SPF-DNS-Entry. We would love to make one, but out of lake of knowledge he have not done so.
Can somebody give me a understandable explanation or link, so we can correct this issue.

could be a network problem on the sender side, network DNS issue or a network/performance issue on your side. Proxmox has a limit on smtp connection (can be increased). whats the error message on the sender side? how many smtp connections per day do you have? just enter this:

[FONT=&quot]grep ": connect from" /var/log/syslog.0 |wc -l[/FONT]

Mabe the oposit Server has an other problem with us. Is there a good way to check??

I know there quite a few questions, and not always easy to answer, but I would apreciate any help!

Regards

JbS

in order to see performance issues we need figures and facts of your installation and real log files, best way is to open SSH access for support@proxmox.com - just send login credentials/ IP and open SSH for our IP 213.129.239.114

 

[JbS]

Thanks for your answers!
Let me go through the answers and update them:
1. Problem has been solved! It the the company had blacklisted a hole range of IP's. One of them beeing ours.
They will correct that and we'lll try again

2. Not aware of a network problem. As 500 Mails pass the SPAM-Filter per day I sort of dought a Network problem....for right now!

3. Receiving e-mails
As mentioned we are missing an SFP-Entry as we have not understood compleatly what settings are right for us...still hoping on a link which explains this matter.
Network problem not jet noticed - where can I see the smtp-connection setting in Proxmox? I might play around with them. I do remember a setting similar to what you mention, but that was based on connection max per domain. Is that what you meen?
grep -->
"SMTP-1:~# grep ": connect from" /var/log/syslog.0 |wc -l
3589"
Are we reaching a limit?
We are planing on trippling the load, so I would be happy to know.
Performance: The daily report shows an average of max. 0.16, 0.06, 0.01
Doesn't seem like a lot. Proxmox is a virtual machine on a HP ML110. That's smale, but it always seem to perform beautifuly!!
Direct SSH-access can not be granted, sorry! Security-Policy

Hope you can help me out as you have already.

Thanks

J-B

 

[tom]

Thanks for your answers!
Let me go through the answers and update them:
1. Problem has been solved! It the the company had blacklisted a hole range of IP's. One of them beeing ours.
They will correct that and we'lll try again

2. Not aware of a network problem. As 500 Mails pass the SPAM-Filter per day I sort of dought a Network problem....for right now!

3. Receiving e-mails
As mentioned we are missing an SFP-Entry as we have not understood compleatly what settings are right for us...still hoping on a link which explains this matter.

please see www.openspf.org for all information about setting up SPF for your domain.

Network problem not jet noticed - where can I see the smtp-connection setting in Proxmox? I might play around with them. I do remember a setting similar to what you mention, but that was based on connection max per domain. Is that what you meen?

no. this setting has to be changed in master.cf (via /etc/proxmox/system.cfg). you only need to change this manually on the console if you have problem with the number of smtp connections.

grep -->
"SMTP-1:~# grep ": connect from" /var/log/syslog.0 |wc -l
3589"

you only have 3589 smtp connections per day which is a really low traffic site - you do not need to change anything here. (think of this if you reach 100k and more).

Are we reaching a limit?
We are planing on trippling the load, so I would be happy to know.
Performance: The daily report shows an average of max. 0.16, 0.06, 0.01
Doesn't seem like a lot. Proxmox is a virtual machine on a HP ML110. That's smale, but it always seem to perform beautifuly!!
Direct SSH-access can not be granted, sorry! Security-Policy

Hope you can help me out as you have already.

Thanks

J-B

 

[JbS]

Still more Problems with Mails not arriving

Hi tom
I'll continue this thread as it all seems to belong together. Or at least should be looked at together.

We are still experiancing problems with the 'lost connection after data..'

AND

We are getting more and more failure-Messages from people whanting to send e-mails to our clients. They receive mostly the message:
'This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

blabla@blabla.com
retry timeout exceeded'

OR

'Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mail.gmx.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
blabla@bla.com:
Connected_to_81.221.19.170_but_connection_died._(#4.4.2)/I'm_not_going_to_try_again;_this_message_has_been_in_the_queue_too_long./
'

This is beginning to be a big problem.

We have made a couple of tests from diffrent .gmx accounts to our domain. The result shows that the graylisting is a problem: gmx resends the e-mail as it should, but always from a diffrent server. So it's beeing graylisted a couple of times....that's at least what we believe to see.

And if we send the same e-mail from gmx to two of our e-mail-Adresses (e.g. same domain) the first e-mail is graylisted and the second directly delivered.
Well the graylisting should stop both e-mails as there two diffrent receipients, shoulden't it??

Problem accours with quite a few big companies. all wich have a couple of e-mail-servers.

I especialy noticed the above graylist-Problem since I've upgradet to 2.1V

HELP??!!??

 

[JbS]

By the way...

Since I upgradet to Gateway V2.1 I can't connect by SSH anymore.
Service is running, but I get a "Server unexpectedly closed network connection" in putty.

 

[tom]

Hi tom
I'll continue this thread as it all seems to belong together. Or at least should be looked at together.

We are still experiancing problems with the 'lost connection after data..'

AND

We are getting more and more failure-Messages from people whanting to send e-mails to our clients. They receive mostly the message:
'This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

blabla@blabla.com
retry timeout exceeded'

OR

'Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mail.gmx.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
blabla@bla.com:
Connected_to_81.221.19.170_but_connection_died._(#4.4.2)/I'm_not_going_to_try_again;_this_message_has_been_in_the_queue_too_long./
'

This is beginning to be a big problem.

We have made a couple of tests from diffrent .gmx accounts to our domain. The result shows that the graylisting is a problem: gmx resends the e-mail as it should, but always from a diffrent server. So it's beeing graylisted a couple of times....that's at least what we believe to see.

And if we send the same e-mail from gmx to two of our e-mail-Adresses (e.g. same domain) the first e-mail is graylisted and the second directly delivered.
Well the graylisting should stop both e-mails as there two diffrent receipients, shoulden't it??

Problem accours with quite a few big companies. all wich have a couple of e-mail-servers.

I especialy noticed the above graylist-Problem since I've upgradet to 2.1V

HELP??!!??

Hi,

Did you get the email from our support (ticket # 3665) or was this lost due to your email problems?

 

[tom]

By the way...

Since I upgradet to Gateway V2.1 I can't connect by SSH anymore.
Service is running, but I get a "Server unexpectedly closed network connection" in putty.

you need to configure SSH access. as a security measure, ssh access is closed by default. see Configuration/System/SSH access.

 

[JbS]

Hi Tom
My LAN-Network is configured in SSH Access.
Just deleted it again and entered it again. Same problem thogh!

 

[JbS]

Hi Tom
No, I didn't get an e-mail from your support. That's why I went back to the forum. That seems to work better.

let me check our gateway...
May 2 15:49:04jscherer@kmu-itm.chsupport@proxmox.comaccepted/deliveredMay 5 08:24:11jscherer@kmu-itm.chsupport@proxmox.comaccepted/deliveredMay 6 08:52:38www-data@www.proxmox.comjscherer@kmu-itm.chaccepted/deliveredMay 6 08:54:47www-data@www.proxmox.comjscherer@kmu-itm.chaccepted/deliveredMay 6 10:02:38www-data@www.proxmox.comjscherer@kmu-itm.chaccepted/delivered

Perfect! That's exactly the problem we have. I have no entry what so ever of your Support reply. Just the e-mails today for the PW-Reset (allways forgett it).

Can you PLEASE check your log and see what it says about the e-mail your support sent us!!

 

[JbS]

Forgott to mention that we turned of graylisting yesterday Monday 5th at 5PM.
It's just been to cumbersom, but now our system has to work 5 times as much.
Would love to turn graylisting on again. As soon as we have a solution.

 

[tom]

Hi Tom
My LAN-Network is configured in SSH Access.
Just deleted it again and entered it again. Same problem thogh!

so there must be a network issue. but I just take a look on our mail queue to your server. I looks that your installation has several problems.

SMTP RESULT:  timed out while receiving the initial server greeting

There are several emails from us which cannot be delivered to your server, so I just paste the content of one email again here:
____
zuerst um info, was sie genau am laufen haben und wie die
hardware/vmware konfiguriert ist.

- hardware: genaue beschreibung (host und gast)
- welche vmware version, (siehe für memory settings auch deployment
guide 6.3 VMware)
- welche Proxmox version (2.1-2294)?
- welcher kernel (siehe admininterface)?
- vmware tools installiert, richtige version? siehe auch
http://www.proxmox.com/forum/showthread.php?t=257


tests die sie am proxmox machen können (nur wenn der server nicht unter last ist), sonst nicht aussagekräftig:

proxperf

(nur wenn server nicht unter last ist, siehe auch
http://www.proxmox.com/forum/showthread.php?t=296

wieviel SMTP connections erhält Proxmox pro tag?:

grep ": connect from" /var/log/syslog.0 |wc -l

bitte schicken sie diese infos - wenn sie nicht weiterkommen, öffnen sie
bitte einen SSH zugang für uns wir schauen uns das direkt an -
das geht am schnellsten. (unsere IP 213.129.239.114)

 

[tom]

Forgott to mention that we turned of graylisting yesterday Monday 5th at 5PM.
It's just been to cumbersom, but now our system has to work 5 times as much.
Would love to turn graylisting on again. As soon as we have a solution.

greylisting is not the problem. you can turn it on again.

 

[JbS]

Hi Tom
I sent you the technikal specs by e-mail.
Please let me know if you got them. Otherwise I can answer you trough this thread.
If you should have answerd already...remember we can't receive e-mails from proxmox..allthough many e-mails have come in in the meen time.

 

[JbS]

Hi Tom
Did you get my e-mail? What do you think of the figures? The Sync looks very low to me, but that's just based on the link you sent me.

 

[tom]

Hi Tom
Did you get my e-mail? What do you think of the figures? The Sync looks very low to me, but that's just based on the link you sent me.

yes I got them. did you configure your vmware host as described in the deployment guide (chapter 6.3, memory settings)?

pls increase also the memory for your Proxmox server to 1 GB. more memory, more SMTP daemons will be started.
your proxperf results are very bad (what raid system?), as a reference see these results from a test environment (vmware, lsi logic sata raid 5, 250 gb sata hdd´s)

proxmox-node1:~# proxperf
CPU BOGOMIPS:      8532.12
REGEX/SECOND:      299006
HD SIZE:           6.89 GB (/dev/sda2)
BUFFERED READS:    83.96 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 8.08 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND:     1315.75
DNS EXT:           16.86 ms
DNS INT:           1.19 ms (maurer-it.com)
DNSBL:             1318.39 ms (zen.spamhaus.org)
proxmox-node1:~#

 

[JbS]

Hi Tom,
We're running a raid 0 (mirror) on seperat discs to the underlying OS. Should be faster Then RAID 5, but the falues look terrible.

I set up a PC with 1GB mem one Disk with 73G with the iso-Image, downloades yesterday night.
After installing I applied our current Licence and then the restore of the last Backup from the productiv System (Backup from yesterday).

Had to stop the old Server bevore I hooked the PC into the net. And then guess what....
First I didn't have a working Network connection --> reboot of Firewall and it registered that the IP is now on an other port --> Net Ok now!
The PC gathers all the Mails for 10 min (approx. 20 e-mails), some pending e-Mails are sent to the internet.....but all the e-mails from outside are not relayed!!!!
It accepts the E-Mals sends it to 127.0.0.1 (Virus Check) returns with 'ok' and then just keeps the e-mails in the queue.
If I click in the queue the log sais something like ' lost contact after/while first handshake/HELO'
Transports are all like they were, network is all the same....

After 25min and 35 e-Mails in the queue I had to stop it and go back to the old system. --> Et voila everything works just fine...at least the relaying to the diffrent clients.

So two questions now:
Any idea why the same configuration should work on one system and not on the other? Is the Licence generated for a special MAC? Can't rememeber?

How can I get the E-Mails in the PC (Queue) out and sent to the right places?

I'm thinking of booting the PC without Net, reconfigure it's ip so I can hook it up parallel to the existing system. Then we can find the relaying problem and after that I can try the switch again.

Please give me your Ideas and thoughts on this new situation!

Thanks

J-B

 

[tom]

Hi,

In order to get your system up and running you need to go step by step.

If you are not doing this you will never isolate the problem. For your convenience, I just point you again to the FIRST steps:

Hardware:
What hard drive setup? raid controller, write cache enabled or not, disks? (raid 0 is striping not mirroring, so just take a look here that we can agree to the right terminology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID)

Configure VMware:
see deployment guide chapter 6.3

Test your Proxmox performance with proxperf and post results.
If you do not get normal values something on your setup is wrong and this has to be corrected before you send emails to your Proxmox server.

 

[JbS]

Hi Tom
I have changed the Memory management according to the Proxmox recomendation. We have 1GB now and memory is only Physical.

proxperf shows same or worse values.

I know you are interested to find the mistake and we will do so, BUT
I have a produktive system droping connections and I need a workaround until we find the problem.

Please give me your thoughts on why the PC I put in yesterday didn't relay correctly.

Parallel we'll work on the problem..

Sorry, but I realy have my clients in my back pushing hard..

Do you still get the same error when you send me an e-mail?

 

[tom]

Hi Tom
I have changed the Memory management according to the Proxmox recomendation. We have 1GB now and memory is only Physical.

proxperf shows same or worse values.

I know you are interested to find the mistake and we will do so, BUT
I have a produktive system droping connections and I need a workaround until we find the problem.

Please give me your thoughts on why the PC I put in yesterday didn't relay correctly.

Parallel we'll work on the problem..

Sorry, but I realy have my clients in my back pushing hard..

Do you still get the same error when you send me an e-mail?

any special reason why you do not give the answer to:

Hardware:
What hard drive setup? raid controller?, write cache enabled or not, disks?