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SBS 2003 Not Receiving Email

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by jgreer

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I have configured the our new SBS 2003 server with exchange from out of the box. It currently sites behind a SonicWall firewall and I have opened port 25 for email. I also posted our server MX records to DNS. I cannot figure this out. The server is not receiving inbound emails, I keep testing and its not working. I attempted to even connect the server directly to the ISP without a firewall and same result. When I send an email just to our IP address I receive a relay failure stating email was rejected by domain. Does anyone have any idea's how to correct this?

16 replies

by Former member

Give your ISP a ring and find out if they have changed the port number.

Please post back if you have any more problems or questions.

by nimmo

The ISP wouldn't have anything to do with the company's email because it is locally hosted mail server.

Can you telnet into your server on port 25?

When you say you get relay denied is there anything else in the NDR?

by cg it

you mention you posted your MX record to DNS. What does this mean?

unless your DNS server is listed at the authoritative DNS server for you public domain name, someway somehow you have to have your domain name resolve to your ISP provided public IP address. without that, you will never get inbound email. you can send it mail out and it will get to it's destination but you won't get mail in....

by jgreer

Covad advised they completed a reverse DNS update for us. On Covad's website I updated the DNS with our firewall's IP as the primary and Covad as the secondary. But still not receiving any email. I wish I could post a screenshot to show you. What changes should I make?

by dumphrey

1) A user send you an email to Usera@somedomaine.com.
2) Their computer looks up the MX record for somedomaine.com. (first place for big error if dns record miss-typed or miss-spelled.
3) The client sends the mail via smtp to your server.
4) The mail has to come in a public interface on your firewall and be translated to a private ip on your lan. ALSO some firewalls need to have SMTP traffic removed from the default scan (ie cisco pix: no smtp fixup protocol), but all firewalls are different.
5) The exchange server has to receive the message, and have a recipient policy to match the somedomain.com or it will reject the message. If you registered the default policy as somedomaine.local... you will need to update your policy and or create a new one.
6) The Exchange server queues the message for local delivery and waits on the mail client, or pushes it to an Outlook client.
Now, you mentioned that the machine was refusing to relay... that means traffic is reaching the machine, and it is responding, but since it will not receive mail, its mis configured some where. My bet would be in the SMTP virtual server under First Storage Group/Server Name/Protocols in system manager. Under properties for that object, check access and in particular the Authentication button. Try setting the Anonymous Access option here. And on the Properties/connection control check that All except List Below is checked.
Also, if you get properties for your servername in Exchng System Manager, there is a diagnostic logging tab to turn on/off a bunch of error messages to the system application log.

by dumphrey

you do not need a secondary mail record pointing to Covad unless you have a secondary mail server...

by cg it

who you bought your domain name from has name servers. Those name servers resolve names to addresses. If your ISP is also your domain name registar, then they have to put in records in their name servers that resolve your FQDN to your public IP address. ....

If you didn't buy your domain name from your ISP then you must go to your domain name registrar and change the name servers to whatever DNS server will be authoritative for your domain name. That can be your SBS box or it can be your ISP name servers but until you change the authoritative name servers with your domain name registar, you won't get any traffic for your domain name to your public IP address....

try an Internet Whois lookup for your domain name. It should tell you what the name servers are...

by jgreer

I think Covad might have done something wrong because now they have escalated a requested stating the DNS is on our side but not setup on their side.

by jgreer

I already had anonymous authentication selected per your steps

Any other ideas?

by dumphrey

And I assume you have a new host provider? Or is Covad the new provider? We use godaddy to register our public DNS information. Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss DNS in more length. Sounds like exchange MAY be set up correctly.

by Former member

General Considerations

A usual problem for most administrators is in how to deal with the way emails come into the Exchange organization and how they are sent to the Internet. Email exchange internally, in general, is no problem at all because it works out of the box within Small Business Server 2003.

If we take a look at the process of sending emails to the Internet first, we will easily find out that we will need to configure an Internet Mail Connector. This connector will connect directly to the recipient?s mail servers using DNS or will send your emails to a relay server at your provider.

The only thing you will need to consider is that you will have to make sure that the last hub for your outgoing emails has an MX entry in DNS for forward and reverse DNS lookups. This is because lots of messaging servers only allow a connection if they are able to check these entries using a reverse DNS lookup.

If you are using your providor's relay server, you will have to make sure that your provider allows relaying for your server or all senders of your domain to make things work properly.

If we have a look at the process of receiving emails, there should not be a problem at all, If we are using the correct technology, which is SMTP. This means that your Exchange Server or a relay Server in your perimeter network (also known as DMZ) has to be configured to accept emails directly from the Internet for the SMTP domain it is responsible for. This means you will have to make sure that this server is your MX entry in public DNS too. The only thing you will then have to configure on your Exchange server is to allow connections from that server.

Another option for small business users is the POP3 protocol. Even though it is not a real server protocol, it can be used to cache emails on the Internet in your POP3 mailbox. You will then have to configure a POP3 Connector (like the one provided with Small Business Server 2003) to make sure that emails are downloaded from the POP3-Server and are being routed internally.

With Small Business Server 2003 we have one wizard that can configure all these things correctly. Within the next sections of this article we will have a good look at it and show what it really configures.
http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Configuring-Incoming-Outgoing-Email-Windows-Small-Business-Server-2003.html

Please post back if you have any more problems or questions.

by cg it

the original poster did not say who is the authoritative DNS server for his FQDN.

The domain registar that registers the domain name uses their Name Servers as the authoritative name server by default. That is any whois query for the questioners domain name will be answered by these name servers. If the questioner did not have the registar create A and CNAME records that point to his ip address, he's never going to get mail. MX records are the domain name [not an IP address] they look like this

TTL10

mail servers looking for his SBS box will send out a query for his domain name looking for an address. The authoritative name server for his domain name has to return his public IP address that his SBS box and network uses for internet access or mail will not get send to him.

this is how SMTP works...

so the questioner has to tell us that he did in fact have the domain name registar create records for him that resolve names to his public IP address and that an Internet whois query on his domain name returns his public address. If so, then the mail problem is more local to his network. If not, it's a DNS problem and probably not his SBS DNS server.

by Former member

Have to wait and see. More detailed info would help us a lot.

by jgreer

Covad advised me the DNS files were corrupted somehow on their end.

by dumphrey

And thanks for posting back to let us know.

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