can send mail, but cannot receive

[avaserver]

Punctually:

1. telnet 127.0.0.1 25 response:
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to 127.0.0.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.ava-design.ro ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)
421 4.4.2 mail.ava-design.ro Error: timeout exceeded - This is loading after aprox 3 min
Connection closed by foreign host.

2. telnet 188.27.238.208 25 response:
Trying 188.27.238.208...
Connected to 127.0.0.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.ava-design.ro ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)
421 4.4.2 mail.ava-design.ro Error: timeout exceeded - This is loading after aprox 3 min
Connection closed by foreign host.

3. host 188.27.238.208:
208.238.27.188.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer avaserver.ava-design.ro.


4. cat /etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1 avaserver localhost.localdomain localhost
188.27.238.208 avaserver.ava-design.ro avaserver
188.27.238.208 mail.ava-design.ro mail

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
f02::2 ip6-allrouters

[SeijiSensei]

The sessions time out because you didn't type any SMTP commands. It does look like you can connect to the ethernet port internally, but it's blocked out here.

If you want to run a test SMTP session you need to type commands like this:

220 mail.ava-design.ro ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)
ehlo localhost
[server replies]
mail from: you@example.com
[server confirms]
rcpt to: you@ava-design.ro
[server should confirm here, too]
data
[server replies]
this is a test message.
.
[server replies]
quit
[server disconnects]

Hold down Ctrl and type "]" to leave the telnet session.

[avaserver]

my isp told me that the port 25 is not filtered.
5 minute ago i was able to send a mail from director@ava-design.ro to a gmail address .

It arives to my gmail address with the following error:


This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.

Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:

director@ava-design.ro

Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)

Technical details of temporary failure:
DNS Error: Domain name not found

----- Original message -----


Tell me something please:
If somewone trying to send me an e-mail at director@ava-design.ro that means that it cannot find the director@ava-design.ro under my ip address (188.27.238.208) so that means that my error comes from my forward zone (var/lib/bind/ava-design.ro.hosts) right?

[avaserver]

I had run SMTP test:

root@avaserver:/# telnet 188.27.238.208 25

Trying 188.27.238.208...
Connected to 188.27.238.208.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.ava-design.ro ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)
mail from: airineivladpaul@gmail.com
250 2.1.0 Ok
rcpt to: director@ava-design.ro
250 2.1.5 Ok
data
354 End data with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>
this is a test mail.
.
250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 2998665D25

[GordThompson]

If I run "telnet 188.27.238.208 25" I don't see an SMTP server listening there. I get no connection at all. I can ping the address however, and nmap shows an array of open ports:

Not shown: 1683 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
21/tcp open ftp
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp filtered smtp
53/tcp open domain
80/tcp open http
110/tcp open pop3
143/tcp open imap
443/tcp open https
548/tcp open afpovertcp
587/tcp open submission
993/tcp open imaps
995/tcp open pop3s
1720/tcp filtered H.323/Q.931
10000/tcp open snet-sensor-mgmt

SMTP is filtered, perhaps by your provider? Perhaps by you? Whichever applies, Postfix won't answer the phone for me.

You might want to try your test on port 25 again just to be sure, but it could be that your ISP is blocking your request. I can't connect from home (same as you) because my home ISP does block traffic on port 25 to anything except their mail server. However, I just tried from a server at work and it could connect to 'mail.ava-design.ro' on port 25 and get a response back from Postfix.

[GordThompson]

5 minute ago i was able to send a mail from director@ava-design.ro to a gmail address .

It arives to my gmail address with the following error:


This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.

Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:

director@ava-design.ro

Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)

Technical details of temporary failure:
DNS Error: Domain name not found

----- Original message -----

That doesn't quite make sense. If you sent a message from director@ava-design.ro to something@gmail.com then what appears in your Gmail inbox should either be 1) the actual message you sent, or 2) nothing at all.

What you quoted was a bounce message for an email you tried to send from Gmail to director@ava-design.ro (i.e, the other direction). Did you try such a test earlier?

[avaserver]

from a putty :

root@avaserver:/# nmap -sS -O 127.0.0.1

Starting Nmap 5.21 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2007-04-17 06:34 EEST
Nmap scan report for avaserver (127.0.0.1)
Host is up (0.000013s latency).
Not shown: 983 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
21/tcp open ftp
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
53/tcp open domain
80/tcp open http
110/tcp open pop3
143/tcp open imap
443/tcp open https
548/tcp open afp
587/tcp open submission
631/tcp open ipp
783/tcp open spamassassin
993/tcp open imaps
995/tcp open pop3s
3306/tcp open mysql
10000/tcp open snet-sensor-mgmt
20000/tcp open unknown


Sometimes i can send mails, sometimes not.
For example 2 h ago i was able to send the mail described above (to a gmail with error and to a yahoo mail without any error).
2 min ago i was not able to send any mails (neither to yahoo, neither to gmail).
Sincerly i realy don`t know what is going on.

I called my isp twice this evening and he assured me that port 25 is opened.
My ISP is the bigest provider from my country giving bussines internet plans for company`s. A lot of those companies are hosting providers, so i don`t believe is an ISP problem.

Sincerly i realy don`t know what to do I have this problem for a week and i cant solve it.


Also for the ip: 188.27.238.208:

root@avaserver:/# nmap -sS -O 188.27.238.208
Starting Nmap 5.21 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2007-04-17 06:47 EEST
Nmap scan report for avaserver.ava-design.ro (188.27.238.208)
Host is up (0.000013s latency).
Not shown: 986 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
21/tcp open ftp
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
53/tcp open domain
80/tcp open http
110/tcp open pop3
143/tcp open imap
443/tcp open https
548/tcp open afp
587/tcp open submission
993/tcp open imaps
995/tcp open pop3s
10000/tcp open snet-sensor-mgmt
20000/tcp open unknown


What command should i use in cmd for verify the open port remotely?

[GordThompson]

What command should i use in cmd for verify the open port remotely?

One way to test would be to use one of the many free web-based mail server testing tools. I did a Google search for 'mail server test' and got a bunch of them. The first one on the list was

http://mxtoolbox.com/diagnostic.aspx

and when I entered 'mail.ava-design.ro' I got the results listed here

http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?....ava-design.ro

They indicate that your mail server is responding correctly to connections from the outside world.

-----

Note that the above is a test to help determine if you should be able to receive mail on that server. If you are now having problems sending mail from that server then some things to check would be

1) Is director@ava-design.ro receiving any bounce messages for the emails that are not being delivered?

2) Are there any entries in the Postfix log(s) that indicate what might be going wrong?

3) You could run your static IP address through an RBL checker like...

http://multirbl.valli.org/

...which I just did, and found that your static IP is in several blocklists, including two Barracuda lists and two Spamhaus lists.

At Spamhaus, the IP address range 188.27.0.0/16 is on the Policy Block List (PBL) because:

"This IP range has been identified by Spamhaus as not meeting our policy for IPs permitted to deliver unauthenticated 'direct-to-mx' email to PBL users."

See this page for more information, including options for getting removed from the PBL.

[SeijiSensei]

I was the one being blocked. I thought I was connecting from one my machines in the cloud, but it was the one in my home which has outbound port 25 traffic blocked. Sorry for the confusion I created.

So now, if I connect from a server in the cloud, I can connect to the SMTP server and issue the "ehlo" and "mail from" commands. However when I try to send the message to "director@ava-design.ro" I get this result:

mail from: someone@example.com
250 2.1.0 Ok
rcpt to: director@ava-design.ro
451 4.3.0 <director@ava-design.ro>: Temporary lookup failure

That's not the same result that you show up in post #14.

[GordThompson]

rcpt to: director@ava-design.ro
451 4.3.0 <director@ava-design.ro>: Temporary lookup failure

Maybe the receiving server is greylisting...?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting