External email problems

[rtpHarry]

Ok so i've done my research and found this issue come up several times in these forums but nobody has provided an answer as of yet.

Our client has an external email server they want all mail to go to, so I went to their DNS settings in plesk (7.6 for windows) and deleted the MX record and the A record for "mail."

Then I added in the new records, an A record for "mail." pointing to the external exchange ip, and an mx record pointing at the "mail."

I am using standard components included with the original plesk installation which are MailEnable and Bind.

The problem is that this doesnt make any difference to how plesk operates. My DNS record for the domain now looks like this:

$TTL	86400
@	86400	IN	SOA	ns.platinumservicesgb.co.uk. web.dbs-uk.co.uk. (
	1164724459
	10800
	3600
	604800
	86400)
platinumservicesgb.co.uk.	IN	NS	ns.platinumservicesgb.co.uk.
mssql.platinumservicesgb.co.uk.	IN	A	82.165.42.54
sitebuilder.platinumservicesgb.co.uk.	IN	A	82.165.42.54
webmail.platinumservicesgb.co.uk.	IN	A	82.165.42.54
ns.platinumservicesgb.co.uk.	IN	A	82.165.42.54
platinumservicesgb.co.uk.	IN	A	82.165.42.54
mail.platinumservicesgb.co.uk.	IN	A	213.190.165.240
ftp.platinumservicesgb.co.uk.	IN	CNAME	platinumservicesgb.co.uk.
[url]www.platinumservicesgb.co.uk.	IN	CNAME	platinumservicesgb.co.uk.[/url]
lists.platinumservicesgb.co.uk.	IN	CNAME	platinumservicesgb.co.uk.
platinumservicesgb.co.uk.	IN	MX	10 mail.platinumservicesgb.co.uk.

Shouldn't this mean that everything should work? The domain is still online in MailEnable, is this correct? If I ping mail.platinumservicesgb.co.uk it returns the local ip not the remote mail exchange. Is this correct?

The only solution I have come up with is to go into the MailEnable application, bypassing Plesk and set the domain to act as a SmartHost, but my problem is that A) the client cannot manage this, and B) doesn't it mean that all their email is collected and forwarded by our server (adding pointless bandwidth to it)?

One final question - if I am making these changes will they be updated straight away in, for example, a ping request on the web server plesk is installed on?

Looking forward to putting this one to rest, thanks for any help that can be shed!

 

[inogen]

Hello forum!

I'm having similar problems I think - or maybe with a similar solution.

I'm using mailenable for my own email - but some of my clients have external dns management, and exteranally hosted email.

No matter what I do (it seems) whenever I email these client's domains, they don't get the email as mailenable and plesk have conspired to send email from me, to a local mailbox for the clients domain created by plesk.

Needless to say the clients do not get their (my) email.

This is also making it very difficult to send them email through cdosys mailforms.

Grrr.

John

 

[paulwilson159]

Have you turned the "Mail" for this domain off?

 

[inogen]

Turning mail on and off makes no difference.

The Postoffice still exists in mail enable either way.

 

[rtpHarry]

Originally posted by paulwilson159
Have you turned the "Mail" for this domain off?

I haven't no, but it seems that its not actually a mail related issue, its DNS.

I added a new DNS entry to point a subdomain to an extranet entrance which shows up in the control panel list, and is in the text file in the C:\Program Files\SWsoft\Plesk\dns\var directory but isn't being used.

I only have server 2003 Web Edition so m$ dns isn't included and therefore cant be interfering.

It seems that Plesk gets its info from another place but I cannot locate it!

 

[poopster]

I had something similar happen and I disabled mail for that domain and everything started working.

Everything was set up properly but mail was just not arriving.

Check your smtp logs to make sure your not doing anything odd with those emails.
Your logs should not even be seeing those emails.


Regards,

poopster