Can not send but can receive email

[rlinebaugh]

First let me say I am new to Scalix and unfortunately Linux. I have inherited a Scalix email server. I have read through the install instructions and some of the admin guide. I am using Outlook 2003 to retrieve and send email. Currently when trying to send an email the process fails and outlook provides the following error:

Task 'email.davisny.edu - Sending' reported error (0x8004210B) : 'The operation timed out waiting for a response from the sending (SMTP) server. If you continue to receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).'

After a few more tries the message will be sent but the message is still visible in my Outbox and the recipient has received the same message multiple times. Receiving email seems to be working fine.

Can some one help me look in the right place and resolve this issue.

Thanks

[eddieedwards]

Which Linux distro are you running?

[rlinebaugh]

centos

[jaime.pinto]

Give OL a rest for a moment. You have to enter debug mode.

Read/send emails using SWA.

Get 2 shells to the scalix server:
On the first shell do a tail -f on /var/log/maillog

On the 2nd shell send an email to yourself and another to an external user using the "Mail* command as in:
Mail -s "testing external send" externaluser@domain.com [enter]
blah blah blah [enter]
. [enter] that is a dot by the way

Post the last 50 or so lines of the tail here.

[eddieedwards]

I was wondering if maybe sendmail was stopped. I'm not so familiar with CentOS, but you might try, as root, "/etc/init.d/sendmail status" to see if it is running.

[rlinebaugh]

Thanks for the reply's. I've been trying to figure out how to give myself the correct permissions to run jamie.pinto's commands. I think I've got it down now but an interesting event happened yesterday. We use Censornet as the web proxy and their was a DNS cache error that came up. After dealing with Censornet and getting that running correctly again, mail seemed to run smoothly again. Could it have been as simple as not being able to resolve email.davisny.edu correctly and therefore sending mail was having a problem but receiving wasn't? That's probably my biggest struggle right now, determining what process/server works with what.

[Valerion]

Mail is extremely reliant on a proper working DNS, and you get lots random-looking failures if that doesn't work. sendmail does a MX lookup of every domain it sends to before it sends the mail out, at the least (probably also reverse-resolve it, as well as the sender's domain).

DNS has been one of my biggest causes of mail failures.

[rlinebaugh]

Thanks for all the help.