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qmail problems - "Sorry, I couldn't find a mail exchanger or IP address. (#5.4.4)"

jola

jola

Basic Pleskian
I am having problems with qmail failing to deliver some mails. I have upgraded to plesk 10.2 and I'm not sure if I had this problem before the upgrade. Most addresses work, but some fail, with the following error message from qmail:

"Sorry, I couldn't find a mail exchanger or IP address. (#5.4.4)"

I have investigated the MX DNS record for these IP addresses and they seem to look okay, one example of an address that fails is "pointwise.com". I have talked to people at the failing addresses and they are able to receive mails from other people.

I am running plesk in a virtuozzo 4.6 container on a dedicated server.

Anyone have similar problems? Any ideas on what I can do to investigate this further?
 
Lots of people have same problem. I think all Plesk 10.2 with QMail.

The only answer from Parallels is change from Qmail to Posfix... And this is not the solution (obviously) :(

I think this is a problem of name resolutions with some domains (it is possible that some domains with a MX of another domain or an alias as MX), perhaps due to IPv6 configuration. But I am not really sure... I have to investigate it deeply (Qmail, Courier, Bind, NSLookup and PSA)
 
Thanks for your feedback inxenio. I'm glad to not be alone with this problem. I do not like the idea of switching mail-system on a production server where qmail has been working well until this problem turned up.

I hope Parallells will find a solution to this. They must have many customers who run the qmail mail system. I suspect everyone is affected by this problem. It only affects a small percentage of all email addresses though and it took me a week to discover it. I'm sure many others will also soon discover this problem.
 
same here

Yes, I also am suffering from this issue. C'mon Paralles, fix this soon please!!!
 
We have the same issue with qmail in Plesk 10.2..

The only temporary solution awaiting for the microupdate is to declare the domain with name resolution problems with a relayhost for it:

Edit the file /var/qmail/control/smtproutes

declare the routes to the mx IPs, not domain names, for example:

domain1.com.ar:200.69.193.18
domain2.com:190.7.59.47
domain3.com.ar:200.69.193.15


Best regards,
Horacio Stolovitzky
 
The temp fix until Plesk fixes it for me was to replace my email server with its ip address in smtproutes. My server uses Centos 5.

This is what I did
1. Get to the directory: cd /var/qmail/control/
2. Backup your file: mv smtproutes smtproutes.bak
3. Edit the file I with the editor you use, mine is nano: nano smtproutes
4. Look at what your mailserver is: :Something.mailserver.here
4. Find its ip address and replace it this is a sample not a real ip address, mine had a colon in front it: :55.555.55.5555
5. Save the smtproutes file
6. Restart your dns server
7. Restart your qmail server

hope it helps
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Thanks HoracioS,

Adding the MX IP of the problematic domain in /var/qmail/control/smtproutes solved the problem.

Hope Parallels finds a better solution fast...
 
same problem here:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at plesk.grafitecture.de.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<censored>:
Sorry, I couldn't find a mail exchanger or IP address. (#5.4.4)
Click to expand...


happens for all *.lv & *.pl tld's

neoweo said:
The temp fix until Plesk fixes it for me was to replace my email server with its ip address in smtproutes. My server uses Centos 5.

This is what I did
1. Get to the directory: cd /var/qmail/control/
2. Backup your file: mv smtproutes smtproutes.bak
3. Edit the file I with the editor you use, mine is nano: nano smtproutes
4. Look at what your mailserver is: :Something.mailserver.here
4. Find its ip address and replace it this is a sample not a real ip address, mine had a colon in front it: :55.555.55.5555
5. Save the smtproutes file
6. Restart your dns server
7. Restart your qmail server

hope it helps
Click to expand...

i can not localize a file named "smtproutes" @ plesk 10.2 (centos 5.6 x64)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Look for the MX IP of each problematic domain on its DNS records (dig domain.com MX);

If no /var/qmail/control/smtproutes, create new and add: domain.com:MX.IP
 
I think that this problem is related to incorrect DNS settings for the domains that we have problems to email. Investigating the DNS setup by looking at for example http://www.intodns.com or http://www.dnssniffer.com shows that the problematic domains have DNS MX records that point to CNAME's. This is not standard compliant and the new version of qmail used in plesk 10.2 will fail to send email to these domains, giving the "Sorry, I couldn't find a mail exchanger or IP address. (#5.4.4)" error.

However, this DNS problem is quite common and all of a sudden your server will be unable to email a lot of other servers. I have convinced some problematic domains to change their DNS settings and remove the DNS MX CNAME problem. Then it starts to work. However, some people assume that the problem is not theirs though, since they can receive email from a lot of other people (who have less standard compliant mail-systems). This is a big problem, especially if you have clients or important contacts who you need to be able to email. If you run a discussion forum or something else that requires email verification when registering it will also lock-out many users from your site.

Adding a problematic MX domain in /var/qmail/control/smtproutes as described by others in this thread solves the problem for that domain only. Then qmail avoids doing a real DNS lookup of this MX record, and thereby does not see the problem. This is just a solution for the domains you have already identified as problematic though.

It would be very good if it was possible to somehow make qmail less standard compliant and able to send emails also to domains with DNS MX records pointing to CNAME's. For a large production server this is almost a necessity. So please help us with this Parallells! As it is now this problem makes plesk useless for large servers that need to be able to email also non-standard compliant DNS MX domains pointing to CNAME's.
 
I can confirm this problem with the domain I was trying to send to, eirebloc.com has spamtitan1.hosting365.ie as MX, and spamtitan1.hosting365.ie is aliased to spamtitan1.hosting365.com. Just plain bad DNS admin. Well spotted jola.
 
What is the status of this fix? All external outgoing mail is coming back with that #5.4.4 error. Can't email any other server including hotmail, gmail, aol, yahoo, etc.

neoweo's temp fix did the trick but I'm guessing Parallels should address this with an official fix.
 
After consulting with development team it is noted that currently relay hosts are working properly. So the issue does not appear to be related to relay hosts, it was caused by some issue at the relay hosts themselves. Thus all questions should be addressed to administrators of the relay servers.

But I have asked developers for re-checking this issue from our side. I will update thread with any results as soon as I receive it.
 
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