Hi Bill,That's not how this works. Your relay server makes outgoing smtp connections from *high* ports, connecting to 25 of the remote machine. If your ISP blocked *outgoing* connections to 25, that would be surprising, and break things. It's more likely that the remote smtp server is just not available.
More specifics:
The linux machine with the toaster installed is set up to be used as an smtp-relay for my LAN. All LAN computers IP adresses have been added to the tcp.smtp file. These LAN computers all have the linux machine set up as smtp server for their (outgoing) mail. So what the toaster machine should do is: accept an incoming smtp connection from all LAN computers (which it does), relay it to the correct server. This is where it goes wrong:
My ISP blocks all incoming ports < port 1024. Which means if you would try to telnet to my linux toaster machine from a non-lan computer 'telnet ip-of-linuxmachine-with-toaster 25' => this would be blocked by my ISP. So the problem is that when my toaster tries to relay the outgoing mail I eventually get the message:
"delivery 11: deferral: Sorry,_I_wasn't_able_to_establish_an_SMTP_connection._(#4.4.1)/"
So I believe a more technical explanation would be that when relaying my machine sends a request as client to an external mailserver, this server sends its response, but the respons doesn't reach my server because the response is sent to a port < 1024. Can this be solved in any way?
But if you are expecting this server to *receive* mail from the internet, your ISP blocks it, as do a lot of ISPs. So a remote qmail server trying to connect to your machine would generate that error. The only solution is for your ISP to open up that port for this machine. Or, host incoming mail elsewhere.
Also, no need to cc me, I'm on the list. Also, please refrain from sending HTML email.
Regards,
Bill Shupp
