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I recently installed qmail in one of my freebsd machines. But whenever I telnet to its port 25 from the same machine or from remote machine, i get instantly disconnected. 

Trying 127.0.0.1
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'

and within a second, i get kicked off.It is not logging anything in /var/log/maillog,messages or qmail logs.

I am not able to figure out what is going wrong.

Sangfroid
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  • Is there any firewall/load balancer or some other device between your machine and the SMTP server? – Khaled Feb 15 '12 at 15:45
  • This sounds like it might be some funkyness with `tcpserver` (which IIRC wraps qmail's SMTP server). It's pretty hard to tell you more though - Have you recently made any changes to the service `run` file for qmail-smtpd? – voretaq7 Feb 15 '12 at 16:32
  • Can you give any more details about your installation? Did you use any patches to add functionality? What is your run script ? Also qmail-smptd log should at least log the connection. Can you see that ? – thanosk Feb 15 '12 at 16:49

2 Answers2

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qmail shouldn't work. it is ten years out of date and flouts the standards.

wfaulk
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adaptr
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    OP should look at this: http://shearer.org/MTA_Comparison or, "OMG, why are you using qmail in 2012?" – cjc Feb 15 '12 at 15:58
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    Worse than that: `1.03 / June 15, 1998; 13 years ago` – Chris S Feb 15 '12 at 16:04
  • I was being generous ;) – adaptr Feb 15 '12 at 16:19
  • I'm using qmail because it's working and I have no time to replace it. The amount of work required to fix it if something were to go wrong is insane -- If our mail server died (or really had *ANY* kind of a problem whatsoever) tomorrow I would NOT rebuild it with qmail. – voretaq7 Feb 15 '12 at 16:28
  • i cannot change it ....it has been our standard... any idea what could be wrong going on ? – Sangfroid Feb 15 '12 at 16:32
  • @Sangfroid I'm afraid I can't help you fix it (though hopefully someone else can - *see the comments on your question and add the requested information*), but I can give you some sound advice: Get your team in a room and decide ***today*** to move to an MTA that has had patches issued in the last 10 years (preferably one supported by your OS vendor), and get on executing that plan ASAP. I know this isn't very helpful, but qmail is blood magic within the already dark-voodoo realm of email - If you're not a high priest of qmail you should probably avoid it. – voretaq7 Feb 15 '12 at 16:59
  • hmm..thank you for the advice..in that case, what is MTA that you recommend the best ? I appreciate your feedback. – Sangfroid Feb 17 '12 at 13:32
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Qmail by default is out of date. Do not run it from source without patching the source or you will be a spam relay instantly. If you want to run Qmail, I suggest you find a packaged, community supported project like Qmailrocks or Qmailtoaster.

John Simpson has added many important patches to Qmail that you will need to think about. You can find his site on qmail at http://qmail.jms1.net/.

John Raley
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