External Mail Relay

[Kwendelr]

Hello,

we are managing some domains in our Parallels Plesk Panel 11 on Ubunut 10.04.
Under the main domain we have activated the Mail Service and created one catch-all mailbox for all mail for this domain.
The server is also its nameserver for all domains. The first mx record (priority 10) of our main domain is the static ip address of our exchange server (ip of another location).
The second mx record (priority 50) is the ip address of the plesk server (catch-all mailbox).

So we have added a second domain in plesk which is only hosting a website and the mail service is disabled.
On this second domain is only one mx record (priority 10) which is set to another external ip address of another exchange server.
The catch-all mailbox on the main domain is also added as smart host on our exchange server for outgoing mails.
So this is all correct and works.

Now we want to send a mail from our exchange (over the smart host) to the second domain.
But we got an answer from the plesk server with the message "Remote Server returned '550 sorry, no mailbox here by that name. (#5.7.17)'"

So the plesk server tries to send the mail internal to the second domain and wont find a mailbox, cause there is none.

But we want that plesk send this mail to the external exchange server (the ip that is the first mx record). The mail service we are using is qmail.

So what do we have to change that the mails for the second domain will be sent to the external server?


Thanks!

 

[Faris Raouf]

Are these two domains in separate Subscriptions? They must be in separate Subscriptions since enabling/disabling the mail service for the primary (first) domain in a Subscription affects all other subscriptions.

Plesk will ONLY treat a domain as local for email if the mail service for that domain is enabled. It will always do a DNS lookup and check the MX record then send to a remote server otherwise. Always. Without exception.

You can check to see if Plesk is treating a domain as local by examining the contents of /var/qmail/control/rcpthosts which will list all domains that the server will accept mail for. (see also virtualdomains which lists email domains and their aliases).

You should also make sure that Plesk knows about the correct DNS records, just in case, by doing a "dig" or "nslookup" or similar for the MX records for the second domain. But I don't think it is a DNS issue at this stage.

Note that you can do some wonderful things with qmail, morercpthosts and smtproutes.
Basically, with seconddomain NOT in rcpthosts (mail service turned off), you can add it manually to morercpthosts, add the domain and the IP of the exchange server in smtproutes and then have the MX records for seconddomain actually pointing to your Plesk server. In this way, mail gets sent to the plesk server for AV and anti-spam, which scans them and sends the message on to the IP of the exchange server. If the exchange server is down (e.g. internet access down, server down), qmail will queue messages for up to X days, trying to send the messages every now and then, until the exchange server is up again at which point it sends them all (slowly, so as not to overwhelm the exchange server).

Take a look at http://kb.parallels.com/en/115531 for more detail on this, or search Google for "qmail store-and-forward" or similar keywords.