asked on

How to determine destination IP when setting up firewall outbound port 587?

I need to open up port 587 on my firewall for a custom program that sends out e-mails to a few people outside the organization. However, it seems that the destination IP address that the vendor that made the program insists is correct does not work when I set up the firewall rule. If I open up full port 587 outbound access though, the e-mails goes through fine.

If I wanted to figure out the correct destination IP address, would I be able to do this on my own? I know the domain that the e-mails are sent to, and when looking up this info, it seems that they may have mail hosted by Rackspace. Does this mean that I should add the Rackspace MX record IPs as my destination address?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Chris Dent

membership

This solution is only available to members.

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

Start Free Trial

Simon Butler (Sembee)

Rackspace will have their own MX records. If the application is on a dedicated server then it will be using different addresses. It could be MX records for their own domain, in which case looking up the MX records for their domain might give you the correct information.

What I would probably do is enable logging for that port on your firewall. Send out an email and see what it connects to. Then compare it to what you have been told by the vendor.

Simon.

ruhkus

ASKER

It looks like it's connecting to multiple addresses that translate back to secure.emailsrvr.com (Rackspace). I guess my options are to add all the IP ranges for Rackspace to my firewall, or just allow full outbound access for port 587. We don't need to be ultra secure here, but is it generally at least somewhat ok to allow full outbound access on port 587?

SOLUTION