Sending (or receiving) my first Scalix message

[bluemike]

Hello,

I have installed Fedora Core 4 and Scalix Community. However I have yet to sucessfully send an email either to or from a Scalix user account.

Here's what I've done so far (in order):

1. Installed FC4 using the 'install everything option'
2. Joined my W2k3 domain using SADMS (Samba tool)
2a. At this point I also added the MX record to the DNS server
3. Created 'userx' as a Windows and Linux user. Shared the /home directory.
4. Installed Scalix Community Ed.
5. Created a user in Scalix called userx
6. Using Evolution Email on server, added an acocunt using localhost as the SMTP
7. Tried to send an email to my Hotmail account
7a. Logs say the message is 'queued for delivery' but it never arrives
8. Tried sending from Hotmail to userx@mydomain.com.
8a. Message immeadiatly bounces back as undeliverable

I feel like I'm really close here. I also think I should mention that have never used Linux before or setup an email server before. So that make this even more likely to be a noob problem.....

Thanks :)

[ScalixSupport]

Hi Mike,

It does sound like DNS isn't setup properly on your Scalix server. If you open a shell on your Scalix server and type:

nslookup
> set type=mx
> hotmail.com

what is returned? Does it show something like:

hotmail.com mail exchanger = 5 mx2.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com mail exchanger = 5 mx3.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com mail exchanger = 5 mx4.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com mail exchanger = 5 mx1.hotmail.com.

If so, type:

telnet mx2.hotmail.com 25

does it come back with some type of message from hotmail?

On the inbound side, it would help if we knew what your domain was, that way we can do a lookup on our side to see if it resolves properly.

Thanks,
Rachel

[bluemike]

I was able to lookup the hotmail MX'es:

> set type=MX
> hotmail.com
Server: 192.168.111.5
Address: 192.168.111.5#53

hotmail.com mail exchanger = 5 mx2.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com mail exchanger = 5 mx3.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com mail exchanger = 5 mx4.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com mail exchanger = 5 mx1.hotmail.com.

Here's what I got on the next step:

> telnet mx2.hotmail.com 25
Server: 192.168.111.5
Address: 192.168.111.5#53

** server can't find telnet: SERVFAIL

I'm not entirely certain what that means.

Regarding my domain, here's the deal. Our public domain is billsblue.com. Currently, all the emaiil goes through our ISP and we use Outlook to retreive from them. Obviously, since I'm setting up an email server, I am hoping to handle it all in-house. Our internal domain is bbpi-pdc.billsblue.com.

Eventually I want to create email accounts that won't have the 'bbpi-pdc' part. I know with Courier there are things called 'virtual domains' but I didn't see anything like that in the install guide for Scalix. I hope I'm not giving yo too much information....

Thanks :)

[ScalixSupport]

Hi Mike,

Is it possible your ISP is blocking socket 25? This is not uncommon in configurations such as yours where your mail goes through your ISP. The reason they do this is to prevent a spammer from using their network to send out spam. If that turns out to be the case, you'll likely need to configure sendmail to use a smarthost and send all outgoing mail through your ISP.

Regarding inbound mail, I did an MX lookup of billsblue.com and it returns:

billsblue.com mail exchanger = 10 mail.billsblue.com.
billsblue.com mail exchanger = 5 avmx.atgi.net.

So, your primary MX is still avmx.atgi.net. I also checked mail.billsblue.com and it's aliased to smtp.atgi.net, so inbound mail is still going to your ISP. In your original message you said you added an MX record to your DNS server, but if that was an internal DNS server, it won't affect billsblue.com because that domain is currently being handled by ns?.atgi.net. So, you'll need to contact your ISP to make those DNS changes for you.

Regarding the handling of "virtual domains", that's not a problem at all with Scalix. As long as a user is defined with that domain and mail for that domain is directed to your Scalix server, mail will be delivered to that user.

Thanks,
Rachel

[bluemike]

Hi Mike,

Is it possible your ISP is blocking socket 25? This is not uncommon in configurations such as yours where your mail goes through your ISP. The reason they do this is to prevent a spammer from using their network to send out spam. If that turns out to be the case, you'll likely need to configure sendmail to use a smarthost and send all outgoing mail through your ISP.

Regarding inbound mail, I did an MX lookup of billsblue.com and it returns:

billsblue.com mail exchanger = 10 mail.billsblue.com.
billsblue.com mail exchanger = 5 avmx.atgi.net.

So, your primary MX is still avmx.atgi.net. I also checked mail.billsblue.com and it's aliased to smtp.atgi.net, so inbound mail is still going to your ISP. In your original message you said you added an MX record to your DNS server, but if that was an internal DNS server, it won't affect billsblue.com because that domain is currently being handled by ns?.atgi.net. So, you'll need to contact your ISP to make those DNS changes for you.

Regarding the handling of "virtual domains", that's not a problem at all with Scalix. As long as a user is defined with that domain and mail for that domain is directed to your Scalix server, mail will be delivered to that user.

Thanks,
Rachel

Rachel,

I want to test this emailserver and run it throught its' paces before I sever the ISP email connection. How can I do that? Would I need to setup an entirely new domain?

THanks for your help so far BTW. ;-)

[ScalixSupport]

Hi Mike,

You're welcome. For sending, you won't need to do anything other than what I mentioned in my previous message. Configure your ISPs SMTP server (the one that you normally send through) as your smarthost. If it requires authenticated smtp, you'll need to edit your /etc/mail/access file and add:

AuthInfo:smtp.xyz.net "U:loginname" "I:loginname" "P:password"

where smtp.xyz.net is your ISPs SMTP host, loginname is your loginID and password is your password. You can find more details about it at: http://www.sendmail.org/m4/smtp_auth.html . Don't forget to rebuild your access.db file once you've saved that change.

For incoming messages you do need to do a few more things. For example, do you already have a fixed IP address from your ISP? You'll need to define socket 25 on your NAT Router to point to your Scalix server. You'll then need to use another domain and have that MX point to your fixed IP address. Now when mail is send to that user@newdomain.com, it will get directed to your NAT Router which will port forward it to your Scalix server.

Thanks,
Rachel

[bluemike]

Since we only send a tiny fraction of the volume of mail we receive, I think I will have Outlook just use the ISP to send mail.

For receiving mail is setting up a new domain really nescessary? 'Cause that will really suck. We already have 6 static IPs from our ISP, and the router is (or will be once this is working) sending all POP traffic to my emails internal IP.

Let me make sure I understand this. It's like this now:

customer sends email to user@billsblue.com
ISP servers get the email and make it available to anyone with the right login & PW
Our internal email clients login and download the email

But this is how I want it to be:

customer sends email to user@billsblue.com
ISP servers get the data, but it's routed to my interal email server.
(a thought: I wonder if my ISP could just add my MX to their DNS records, with a higher priority?)
Our internal email clients login and download the email

It's really important that I both test the server before it goes live, AND that I don't have to start using new email address (i.e. user@billsblue.com --> user@newdomain.com)

[ScalixSupport]

Hi Mike,

If you want to test the setup without cutting anything over, then you will have to have an alternative route to your Scalix server. I assume when you say "test", you mean that you'll be using test accounts in Scalix, so no, you won't have to have a new email address.

Once you're satisfied that everything is working and you're ready for the actual switchover, you need to have your ISP change your MX record to point billsblue.com to your NAT Router. At that point, you also need to make sure everyone has an account in Scalix with the same email address they had before. Now when someone sends mail to user@billsblue.com it will go to the NAT Router, port forward to the Scalix server and land in the user's mailbox.

Are your users just going to POP mail from the Scalix server or are you going to have them use SWA as well? If they're going to use SWA, you will need to have your Scalix server setup to send outbound mail. In fact, you'll want to get that setup anyway so that bounced mail can be returned.

Thanks,
Rachel

[bluemike]

OOOOOOO I see now!

Do you realize how long I've looked for this answer? Awesome! Maybe it's just now starting to all sink in, or maybe your a genius!

I will setup a testing domain and test everything there (with test accounts of course). And once I have all the kinks worked out, I'll just call the ISP and have them make the DNS change there. No changing of email address, and (hopefully) no measurable downtime. Sweet!

Regarding SWA. What is that? Is that a protocol that Scalix uses? I was just going to have the users POP mail from the Scalix server put a 'reply address' in Outlook. But I see your point. If it bounces back, we would never know it would we? Hmmmm....

[ScalixSupport]

Hi Mike,

Sorry, sometimes we get a little acronym happy. SWA is Scalix Web Access and SAC is Scalix Admin Console. SWA is our webmail product which provides users with a very rich webmail client. It's part of Scalix Community Edition, you should definitely give it a look.

Thanks,
Rachel

[burhankhalid]

Just downloaded the community edition (by the way, heard about this over at the exim users mailing list).

My current setup is that I have an external exim mail server that is providing primary mail services. It also has a pop and a IMAP server running (this server is RHEL)

I have a local network with a local DNS server, and one static IP address. I am using the same domain name on my internal DNS and external DNS servers. So, the internal DNS server's MX record for my domain points to our external exim box.

What I would like to do is setup Scalix on one internal server to test it against some users and see how it fits into our environment, without having it handle our main email services.

I just want to verify that :

1. If I configure the local DNS server and add a MX record pointing it to the Scalix box, that atleast internally, I should be able to send and recieve email. I will not be able to send email outside of my local network, unless I setup a smarthost. That it will also not affect existing clients that are not on the test server. Will I need to add another domain to the internal DNS just for testing? I would rather not do this.

2. Eventually, I would like to run Scalix on the main box (external RHEL server) and run as a backup, Scalix on the internal company network. Is this sort of setup possible? Have one server as a backup/mirror for the other?

Thanks for your tips :)