Email not forwarding

Question asked by Brian Davidson - 7/19/2019 at 12:26 PM

Unanswered

Somewhere along the line in the past month or two, forwarding stopped working successfully. It's unclear if this is an issue with SM 17 or a domain setup issue. Messages to an alias or email account with forwarding that come from external senders are not forwarded. However, a message originating from any domain on our server to an email account with forwarding works as expected. So, forwarding only works if the sender is a user on our server. I see nothing in the logs to indicate why the messages fail forwarding. They simply disappear.

The only change is that we've updated SM along the way to the lastest builds. But otherwise, the forwarding behavior has broken and I can't figure out why! It feels like a domain record issue, but for the life of me I don't know. Maybe spam check issues?

Any suggestions or thoughts are appreciated.

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Kyle Kerst Replied

7/22/2019 at 3:26 PM

Employee Post

Can you check to see if SRS is enabled when forwarding? This is configured under Settings>Antispam>Options card. SRS will rewrite the return-path information accordingly for forward events like this. Otherwise I recommend checking to see if you're on the latest minor as well, as there were some known automated forwarding issues in the past.

Kyle Kerst Acting IT Manager SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Brian Davidson Replied

7/23/2019 at 11:56 AM

Kyle, thanks for the suggestions. SRS was enabled (I disabled it and same result either way). I am on the latest build (July 5). I still have forwarded emails eventually leaving the spools, but disappearing. The SMTP log shows the incoming message, but no evidence of an attempt to forward to an outgoing email address.

For forwards to Gmail at least, I'm getting the following error when viewing recipients in the spool: Error: 601 Attempted to send the message to the following IPs: (with list of IPs).

The other symptom I've noticed is that on occasion the spool's "next attempt" time is earlier than the current time. So it may show 1 attempt with the next attempt at "2:30 pm." when it is already 2:35pm.

Kyle Kerst Replied

7/23/2019 at 1:46 PM

Employee Post

Brian, you're very welcome! In reviewing your follow up, it sounds like this might be DNS lookup or routing related. Have you checked recently to make sure you're not listed on any blacklists via mxtoolbox.com? If that all checks out, its possible your server is having trouble locating correct IP addresses for the domains it is forwarding to. You can try temporarily setting Google DNS under Settings>General where you can set these:

Google DNS 1: 8.8.8.8

Google DNS 2: 8.8.4.4

If you have better luck with those in place its possible the DNS servers you were using before were not able to relay requests properly for these domains. Finally, if all of these check out, its possible you're on an internal blacklist somewhere and you may need to reach out to the provider. For Google, Yahoo. Hotmail/Outlook I typically use a process like this one to get off their internal blacklists:

- Create test accounts at major providers.

- Create test accounts on your SmarterMail server.

- Send emails back and forth between these accounts, marking Not Spam each time you see it drop into the junk mail folder.

Slowly but surely your server's reputation will improve on these providers' internal lists. All of this might warrant a deeper look though, and I recommend submitting a support ticket so we can really dig into this one. Thanks for your time Brian. Have a great day!

Kyle Kerst Acting IT Manager SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Brian Davidson Replied

7/30/2019 at 6:23 AM

Kyle,

** Update**

After posting the message below we re-enabled the outgoing gateway with SMTP2GO and the domain's email does appear to be going out again.

Thanks for the information but I don't know believe its a server reputation issue. Neither our IPs or this one domain are listed. We were sending email via SMTP2GO, then for simplicity switched this off, but get the exact same results.

This is only happening with one domain, and now it's all outgoing email from that domain. We are not listed, best I can tell, on any black lists. All outgoing mail continues to fail with a 601 error, again, only for this one domain. I took the extreme step of completely deleting the domain from SM this morning and re-creating it, with the same result. We have SPF, DKIM and DMARC all successfully enabled for the domain.

Best I can tell, for this one domain, the system simply can't connect to any external IPs when sending for this one domains. Very peculiar and frustrating!

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