Use second IP address for mail server

[rbartz]

Hello!

I leased a dedicated server from a large ISP a few months ago. The primary IP address apparently had spam problems historically.

At this time it seems the whole range of IP addresses for this ISP (64.150.188.0/24) seem to have a poor reputation with Cisco Ironport, and a couple of our clients hosted on this particular server are being blocked. The ISP has been deaing with Cisco for moe than a week about it, but no resolution so far.

The server has never had spam passing through, the mail flow is almost nothing. The Ironport reports on it do not show spam as far as we can see, but the reputation remains "poor".

The server has 5 IP addresses. Can one of the "clean" IP addresses be used for the mail server IP? The server runs Centos 5 set up as a "Perfect Server" running ispconfig 2, postfix, dovecot etc.

Any ideas or any way to get around that server's IP with a bad rep?

RDB

[falko]

Take a look at the smtp_bind_address setting: http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html

[rbartz]

Thank You Falko.

After looking at some of the routing issues in trying to use postfix's smtp_bind_address and the problem of a lot of mail servers now rejecting mail from any servers with less than perfect rDNS addressing, we decided to change the primary IP of the server. Postfix immediately started using the new IP, the deferred mail went right out, and we did not even have to reboot after changing the networking configurations and restarting network.

Althought it looked a bit daunting at first, it was actaully fairly easy and did not interrupt our services at all. If anyone tries to do this, be sure you set up the rDNS before you change over. Otherwise it is just changing the network configurations and hosts and gateway files. Your ISP should be able to advise you.

Richard