qmail cannot send mail outside of our upper domain addresses

[julian...@gmail.com]

Recently I have replaced 'sendmail' with 'qmail' on my RedHat 7 server.

With 'sendmail', send/receive mails local or outside (world) was working fine. However, when I un-installed 'sendmail', installed latest 'qmail', and it's running fine:

> ps | grep qmail
qmails 74284 0.0 0.0 Apr06 00:00:00 qmail-send
qmaill 74285 0.0 0.0 Apr06 00:00:00 splogger qmail
root 74286 0.0 0.0 Apr06 00:00:00 qmail-lspawn |preline procmail
qmailr 74287 0.0 0.0 Apr06 00:00:00 qmail-rspawn
qmailq 74288 0.0 0.0 Apr06 00:00:00 qmail-clean

Now I can send/receive mails local, and receive mail from the world, but cannot send mail outside of my upper domain (world). 'mailq' shows they hang in the local mail queue forever (some of them are more than 48 hours by now). I do have 'smtproutes' set up that the "/var/qmail/control/smtproutes" with a line like:

:mailhub.myuniversity.edu

(no space nor extra line). This is the same way as I run qmail on my another server (RedHat 6) in the very same environment that works fine for years. I wonder is there anything new (with respect to qmail on RH7) that I may have missed? Or anything new with qmail? Any clue to diagnoze?

Thanks in advance,
joe

[Andreas F. Borchert]

Whether emails go to the local email queue (via qmail-lspawn) or
to the remote queue (via qmail-rspawn) depends on the configuration
for qmail-send. Unfortunately, you did not share with us its
configuration. The file "locals" should list the local domain names
and decides what is to be forwarded to qmail-lspawn. Likewise all
domains of "virtualdomains" are treated as local. Everything else
goes to qmail-rspawn which considers "smtproutes". But as you claim
that the emails hand in the local mail queue, qmail-rspawn appears
not be involved and "smtproutes" is consequently not evaluated.

Please do not forget to send SIGHUP to qmail-send whenenver "locals" or
"virtualdomains" is updated.

Andreas.

[julian...@gmail.com]

Thanks for the reply! I am sorry to see it so late.
My qmail/control/locals contains following lines:

localhost
thismachine.upperdomain.myuniversity.edu

for mails sending to domains not listed in 'locals' will be delivered
remotely, correct?

In addition I tried

telnet gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25

and it waits on "trying" forever (ping works fine). This looks like a
port blocking issue. However, interestingly, I tried to work around
by setting up "smtproutes" to use our university mailhub for outgoing
mails:

:mailhub.myuniversity.edu

and it does not seem to work. Do I miss something? Further suggestions?
(additional info: I follow the way how qmail is configured on another
server of mine in the very same environment working fine for years.)

By the way this is RH7. Anything particularly new on RH7?

j.

[Julianony M]

Problem solved: besides sendmail there is a postfix installed and bound to port 25 for mails therefore qmail was actually not in action. Did away with both sendmail and postfix now qmail is able to route mail for relay server.

j