Re: sSMTP, this mailing list, and helo errors

2009-09-16 Thread Michael Powell
Chad Perrin wrote:

 I moved email from a FreeBSD 6.2 machine to a FreeBSD 7.2 machine.
 
 On both machines, I'm using sSMTP[1] to send email to a mailserver
 managed by a shared hosting server, with SSL/TLS authentication.
 Everything works, except for one small problem -- sending email to this
 list.  It has apparently exposed a problem with the setup.  I get a Helo
 command rejected: Host not found error when sending to this list.
 
 The weird part is that I'm using *exactly* the same ssmtp.conf file on
 both the 7.2 system and the 6.2 system.  As you can see -- since this
 email comes from the 6.2 system -- that configuration file isn't causing
 any problems sending with sSMTP on 6.2, so I'm a little confused about
 the cause of the problem.  Where else should I look for a problem?
 

My first guess would be DNS. Whenever I see something like a 'host not 
found' of this nature I think no PTR record. Although I would think wrt 
mail the MX record would matter. My thinking is the two configs you have 
mentioned being identical the problem is a third config somewhere else, and 
first thing I'd look at is name resolution, forward and reverse.

Grab a copy of the transaction with tcpdump or Wireshark. Perhaps the list 
filtering software is seeing mail with a From: some domain it isn't 
recognizing and blocking. Tcpdump/Wireshark from both hosts and compare for 
differences in the mail headers, e.g., the one that works and the one that 
doesn't. With Wireshark this is easy, just start a capture, send an email, 
stop capture, and use the Follow TCP Stream menu option. Or use tcpdump 
and import it into Wireshark.

-Mike
 


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Re: sSMTP, this mailing list, and helo errors

2009-09-16 Thread Chad Perrin
I evidently forgot to disable Sendmail in my rc.conf on the 7.2 machine,
which in turn reminded me that I had forgotten to change the mailer.conf
to indicate my alternate MTA for sending emails.  This means that my
ssmtp.conf file was irrelevant, because sSMTP wasn't being used to send
emails at all anyway.

The relevant lines for mailer.conf, in case someone later on stumbles
across this thread looking for a solution to the same problem, are:

sendmail/usr/local/sbin/ssmtp
send-mail   /usr/local/sbin/ssmtp
mailq   /usr/local/sbin/ssmtp
newaliases  /usr/local/sbin/ssmtp
hoststat/usr/local/sbin/ssmtp
purgestat   /usr/local/sbin/ssmtp

If this email gets through to the list, consider my problem solved and
myself suitably chagrined at having overlooked something that should have
been so obvious to me.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]


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