Start Free Trial

asked on

How do I fix not being able to receive emails from addresses that are outside company domain?

I've restarted my servers a few times and everything was fine, but yesterday I restarted them again, and since 1pm yesterday, nobody has been able to receive emails from addresses that are outside of the company domain. E.g. "@hotmail.com" "@gmail.com" etc.. We can send to outside emails perfectly fine and internal sending and receiving works fine, but we cannot receive from external emails. I've already tried telnetting and I've gotten all the right responses and IP addresses. I have no clue what to do and this is affecting 350+ company clients which is causing major problems. Please help!!!

One server is the Domain Controller with Active Directory and the other is running exchange, files, and apps. We only have 2 servers here.

ASKER

Please help me!! This is mission critical!!

1) Go to https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com and Run Inbound E-mail flow TEst and post the results

2) Go to http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx and make sure your domain is not blacklsited

ASKER

viralrathod -
The results to the exchange test:
"The test result has expired and cannot be retrieved. Please run the test again."
That is the message that it keeps giving me when I test it.

I also want to add that when I tried telnetting to port 25, it tells me, "connect failed". Does this have something to do with it?

ASKER

"Cyberlogic" and "spamrbl" for blacklist gives a yellow mark and says both timed out, but all others show green and ok.

Go to http://www.mxtoolbox.com/portscan.aspx and run port scan and make sure port 25 is open

OR you can go to "canyouseeme.org" and make sure port 25 is open

Also you need to remove your domain from above blacklist servers ,else your inbound mail flow will not work.

ASKER

Also, "emailbasura" has a yellow mark with timed out error on blacklist check.

A timeout on the Blacklist Tool just means that at the time of the query that Blacklist did not answer. It does not necessarily mean you are listed on that Blacklist.

ASKER

This is what shows up when I do a port scan using portscan on mxtoolbox and blacklist checker
port25.jpg
blacklist.jpg
Untitled.jpg

ASKER

I also just tried to run a test on inbound mail using the first link you provided and it came back as "connectivity test successful" with all green checks on each item.

Did you receive the e-mail which you have sent using above testexchnageconnectivity tool ?

I guess the port 25 is blocked from your server or firewall

Can you go to http://canyouseeme.org and make sure port 25 is open

letus know the results.

ASKER

I did not receive any emails using the testexchangeconnectivity too. "Error: I could not see your service on 12.111.39.131 on port (25)
Reason: Connection timed out" That is the message that comes up on canyouseeme.org when I check port: 25 from the exchange server.

ASKER

Could it be possible that port 25 could be blocked from the server or firewall from simply restarting the servers after updating them? I did not do anything else, but restart them.

ASKER

Another thing to note is that the firewalls on all computers and servers are off.

Can you post me the results of testexchnageconnectivity tool ?

In that portscan pic you only put in "25" instead of your IP, so it ran checks against 0.0.0.25

Using the IP you put into the other search tools, I can connect to port 25... but it's Postini...

Are you sure 65.18.6.10 is the correct IP?

[root@broken ~]# telnet 64.18.6.10 25
Trying 64.18.6.10...
Connected to 64.18.6.10.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 Postini ESMTP 249 y6_43_0c9 ready.  CA Business and Professions Code Section 17538.45 forbids use of this system for unsolicited electronic mail advertisements.

Open in new window

Once check this at Postini end.,,
As the test exchange connectivity is sucesfull

ASKER

viralrathod: See pic that I attached for results of test.
Untitled.jpg

This attachment says that the inbound mailflow is fine, so once check wether it is reaching our exchange server or not.
If not check with the third party(Postini in this case).

ASKER

The exchange server's external ip address is: 12.111.39.131. I used the mxtool to test that ip address and it comes back with "Timeout occurred due to inactivity." I ran it a few times and everytime it was the same thing with the timeouts.

ASKER

exchange9, how do I do those two things that you said?

ASKER

I ran the test on the server again and this time I got a response instead of a timeout. See pic for that. It shows that the smtp and other ports are off.
server.jpg

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

Stop testing with 12.111.39.131, that is not where the mail going to for your domain from the internet, it is going to Postini.

Is that IP pingable..? Make sure once.. check the server is online or not..

ASKER

where do I go to check the postini logs?

http://www.google.com/support/postini/bin/answer.py?answer=1067389

Read the Log Search section.

ASKER

I can access the internet and everything else on the servers and I can ping both servers. I can't ping the "12.111.39.131" ip though because its the server's outside ip address.

[root@broken ~]# telnet 12.111.39.131 25
Trying 12.111.39.131...
telnet: connect to address 12.111.39.131: Connection timed out

Open in new window

12.111.39.131 is not listening on port 25. You need to start the search at Postini and forget about 12.111.39.131 for now.

Check wether you have any incoming mails in queues.

Also you have message tracking center node in tools :
Check this once
http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Exchange-2003-Message-Tracking-Logging.html

That link is for 2003 and for advanced versions check message tracking center under tool box.

Who is your ISP? - My ISP (comcast business) blocked Port 25 on their router without notice. Switch exchange to a different port to test.

Or open port 26 on your firewall and forward to port 25 on your exchange server. (what we ended up doing)

Sorry I just read thought the other posts, since you have your mail going though Postini, it's probable set to connect with your exchange server on port 25. So you need to change this to another port so it can connect to exchange (i.e. 26).

It should look something like this:

=>Postini =>Firewall yourIP:26 = (Portforward)>exchange:25 (or you could switch this too)

Hi,
Please use the below given link and analyze the issue.

1) Go to https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com and Run Inbound E-mail flow TEst and post the results

2) Go to http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx and make sure your domain is not blacklsited

3) Go to http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/port-scan/ and make sure the port is not blocked.

ASKER

The problem has been fixed! Thank you to everyone who was helping me through this. What ended up happening was that the vendor that we use for our big jobs like Postini troubleshooting and stuff logged into our Postini account and saw that the email spooler was stopped and needed to be restarted. It stopped when I rebooted the exchange server, so the reboot actually did cause this error technically. The guy from the vendor just rebooted the email spooler in Postini and all the external emails started flowing in like crazy. Once again thank you all for your help!!!