WebMail - 550 Authentication is required for relay

Problem reported by Martin Schaible - 2/17/2020 at 4:11 AM

Resolved

Hello

Since we moved from version 15 to 17 we have the following problem: A users sends an email to GMail and he gets the message: "Tte Server returned: '550 Authentication is required for relay'".

I would understand, if we're suffering from bad configured e.g. Outlook, but the users uses the Webmail.

The DNS is okay, we have valid DMARC and DKIM settings, SPF is also good.

Any idea, where to look?

Thanks!

5 Replies

Reply to Thread

Kyle Kerst Replied

2/17/2020 at 8:40 AM

Employee Post

Martin, this behavior might indicate that GMail believes the domain is hosted on their side. Was this domain name ever on a GSuite account by chance? If not, I'd be on the lookout for an improperly configured outgoing gateway. Hope that helps!

Kyle Kerst Lead Internal Network/System Administrator SmarterTools Inc. smartertools.com

Martin Schaible Replied

2/17/2020 at 9:45 AM

Hello Kyle

The GMail address is my private E-Mail address at gmail.com. Not only GMail is affected: We tried to send an EMail to unlocktheinbox.com to check if DMARC and DKIM are allright. We got the same error message.

As i wrote, the behaviour started at the time, after i upgraded the Mail-Server a while ago.

I also compared the settings of the affected domain with others, no difference at all. It's really odd.

Since the DNS is not under our control, i asked for details. Maybe they have a problem there.

Thanks!

Martin Schaible Replied

2/17/2020 at 11:35 AM

Dear Kids, don't do that at home:

The account had a SMTP account under "Connectivity" with the same credentials and data of its own EMail-Account! This might confuse everything and everybody. After deleting this SMTP account, everything is fine.

I can only guess: Older versions of SmarterMail where able to deal with this silly situation and newer don't.

Maybe SmarterMail might program a checking functionality, which disallows to enter an existing EMail-Account of the SmarterMail-Server as an external SMTP-Account.

Cheers!

Kyle Kerst Replied

2/17/2020 at 3:20 PM

Employee Post

Hi Martin, glad you got that figured out!

I'm sorry to hear the web interface did not prevent this from being accomplished. I did a quick test in our latest release as well and here too it allowed me to create an SMTP Account with the same credentials as my main account.

I don't think that is expected behavior, so I'm going to document this with our development team so we can get it resolved in the near future. Thanks again Martin, I appreciate you following up with your findings.

Kyle Kerst Lead Internal Network/System Administrator SmarterTools Inc. smartertools.com

Employee Replied

3/18/2020 at 4:19 PM

Employee Post

Coming up in the next BETA release, the interface will now check if you are trying to test or save an SMTP account with information that links back to the same account on the server, and throw an error if it detects it. Thank you for reporting this issue. Please let me know whether or not it works out for you.

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