Apparent end of the email fiasco
Well, it appears that I have gotten my email problem straightened out again. I need to do some more testing before I decided to turn back on automatic downloading of all of my email onto my home system, but so far everything seems to work ok.
Here was what was happening. First, I had set knology as my relay host, meaning that all of my email would go through them (necessary since they block all outgoing email traffic unless it is going to their server). However, they were not forwarding email on to addresses on other hosts, like my parents’ address. So, in trying to fix that problem, I got my server configuration so messed up that the automatic downloading of all of my email for most of a day just went away…. lost in the bit-bucket, as it were. Finally, I came to the conclusion that knology would not forward on email if it did not appear to come from an email address hosted on their servers, so I had to set up some address translation to make my local address appear in the email header to be from knology. Now they accept my email and send it on its merry way.
However, I still had the problem of fetchmail seeming to just delete all of my email. Turns out that it was trying to forward it through knology as well… which was not what I wanted. More configuration changes showed that I had my mail host name set up incorrectly. It is fixed now and mail appears to be moving normally. But, I think I will take more time to test…
Update: Oops, I spoke too soon. In anticipation of Ashley using the home server for her email, I placed the same address translation for her email address as I did for mine. That caused the server to think that my emails for her (which needed to be sent to knology for relaying) needed to be delivered locally. The effect of that is that the emails I sent for Ashley started to pile up in her account on the server, which she never checks. Luckily, that was a relatively easy fix, compared to the rest of the problems I have had…
July 21st, 2005 at 12:25 pm
You couldn’t send on port 26?
July 21st, 2005 at 12:32 pm
Well, the problem is more of who I am sending to. They appear to be blocking outgoing connections to port 25. So, if I am making a connection to port 25, it had better be to one of their servers or it will be blocked (as far as I can tell).
July 21st, 2005 at 4:43 pm
Ahhhh. Makes sense.
July 21st, 2005 at 9:56 pm
Wacky, but sensible. Good job hacking through all of that.
July 24th, 2005 at 12:35 pm
Isn’t it fun when you think you have something licked, and then it comes to kick you in the ass again? Kinda like my spam problem on the server … had reports on 24 Jun [including one guy who called me out of the blue to let me know, which was cool of him to do], thought I had it cleared up, and then … BAM! Offline.
Oh well, it keeps me out of bars.