Sendmail Trouble, Emails don't turn up in most inboxes

[Ralle]

Hello guys!
I have been browsing this site a lot and I am very happy with it.

I have a problem with the mail server.

I installed CentOS which came with sendmail I guess.
I then compiled Lighttpd, APC and MySQL and installed it all.

Then I set some MX records for my domain (http://www.hiveworkshop.com)

But after having set up a server my own (this one), only emails to @gmail.com and some other systems are properly sent.

I tried to look at pingability.com, check it here:
http://pingability.com/zoneinfo.jsp?...veworkshop.com

And I realized that it cannot connect to my mail server.

I have tried:

$ service xinetd start

But that didn't help.

Then I searched on google and didn't find much help.

What do you suggest I try?

Ralle

[chuckl]

A good starting point is to go to www.dnsstuff.com and do a DNS Report on your domain. Check the mail section, and fix any errors they flag.

[Ralle]

Mail
FAIL
Connect to mail servers
ERROR:  I could not complete a connection to any of your mailservers!

mail.hiveworkshop.com: Timed out [Last data sent: [Did not connect]]

If this is a timeout problem, note that the DNSreport only waits about 40 seconds for responses, so your mail *may* work fine in this case but you will need to use testing tools specifically designed for such situations to be certain.

OK, so this is my exact problem. But what could be wrong?
I went to the "system-config-securitylevel-tui" menu and enabled SMTP.
Sendmail is running on default config of CentOS.
I read something about sendmail normally is internal. Not connectable from outside.

What do you think?

[chuckl]

Sendmail is an aspect of mail, it can be a complete package - i.e. sendmail, or it can be another mail server e.g. exim, postfix, qmail etc masquerading as sendmail for backwards compatibilty. Mail servers usually use SMTP to transfer mail between domains
Did you follow one of the Perfect Setup guides? If so, you have probably Postfix installed.
Secondly, is your machine called mail.yourdomain.com? When setting up an MX record, it has to contain the true fully qualified domain name of the mailserver, or be correctly aliased.
In order for dnsstuuf or pingability or any other service to be able to check your domain, the DNS records must be correct, so thats the place for you to start.

[chuckl]

Just to clarify that a bit, if you create a DNS entry for mail.mydomain.com, it would look like this:

mail.mydomain.com. MX 10

N.B. the final '.' on the name is important.

meaning that the mail server has a priority of 10. The server to which mail is ultimately delivered, i.e. that one, should have the lowest numbered priority.

Matching that should be a DNS entry for that machine e.g.

mail.mydomain.com A 111.111.111.111

which tells the world where to find that machine. SImilarly, at some stage you should probably add an SPF record for the domain, defining the sending mail servers, or very little will get through.

Hope that helps,

[Ralle]

Originally Posted by chuckl

Did you follow one of the Perfect Setup guides? If so, you have probably Postfix installed.

No I did not. I will look at the guides now.

Originally Posted by chuckl

Secondly, is your machine called mail.yourdomain.com? When setting up an MX record, it has to contain the true fully qualified domain name of the mailserver, or be correctly aliased.

I have a subdomain: mail.hiveworkshop.com which is an A record linking to the same servers IP.

Originally Posted by chuckl

In order for dnsstuuf or pingability or any other service to be able to check your domain, the DNS records must be correct, so thats the place for you to start.

They cannot check my mail server.

I might want to tell you my main problem.
My problem is that emails sent from my server are not received by hotmail and many others.
I have only succeeded to actually receive an email using gmail.
I have an SPF record and it fixed it so mails are not spam for gmail. But it's all still blocked from hotmail.

I have hosting with Layeredtech. The ReverseDNS should be set up correctly, I have SPF record, MX record. So the only thing that comes to my mind is that hotmail tries to contact my mail server to check if my server is valid.

[chuckl]

That is almost certainly your problem. Normally in hosted environments, the hosting co mail servers do all the mail sending, and all you do is pass the mail to their servers. MX records are set up accordingly. In fact many places actively block the SMTP ports to prevent mail being sent directly.

While you may have an A record pointing at your server, does your server respond to mail connections as mail.hiveworkshop.com?

I'm sure hotmail et al are receiving the mail, but they are fairly well known for deleting any mail they feel is 'suspicious'.

[Ralle]

Originally Posted by chuckl

While you may have an A record pointing at your server, does your server respond to mail connections as mail.hiveworkshop.com?

Well I guess not. Else pingability would notice it.

Anyway, I am going to post a layeredtech support ticket about email sending.

Thanks!

EDIT:
Okay, I have had contact with LayeredTech. They say I am 100% managed. So they aren't blocking anything.

[falko]

Take a look here: http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/sho...hlight=hotmail
http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/sho...hlight=hotmail

[Ralle]

I got it working!
It was my MX record. I linked to mail.hiveworkshop.com but should link to sawyer.hiveworkshop.com

Thanks for your help all!