postfix issues

[Josh Sharpe]

For whatever reason my moonshine-deployed app has stopped sending emails, here's what I've figured out so far.

There's very little reference to postfix in all of moonshine, essentially it all boils down to this:

  def postfix

    package 'postfix', :ensure => :latest

  end

...which I suppose just ensures that postfix is installed.

Now, as of right now I don't have ActionMailer explicitly configured in production.rb (or environment.rb for that matter) -- and emails *were* going out.  Now they're not.  /var/log/mail.log tells me this:

Nov 18 02:38:28 app1 postfix/smtp[18833]: B1B7CC00AD: to=<josh.m...@gmail.com>, relay=alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[209.85.221.86]:25, delay=3284, delays=3222/0.02/30/32, dsn=4.7.0, status=deferred (host alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[209.85.221.86] said: 421-4.7.0 [174.143.240.136] Our system has detected an unusual amount of 421-4.7.0 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our 421-4.7.0 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily 421-4.7.0 blocked. Please visit http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html 421 4.7.0 to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. 26si13611183qyk.106 (in reply to end of DATA command))

I get that it's saying I'm getting throttled all of a sudden.  Fine, whatever -- what's more important is why is it running through gmail's SMTP servers to begin with?  I haven't defined/configured anything related to gmail smtp servers except in config/environments/development.rb. greping my app for 'smtp', 'google', 'gmail' confirms this.

I'm certain I don't fully understand the relation between postfix/smtp. Is postfix a smtp server? Does postfix need an smtp server to send stuff to?

I realize this is kind of off-topic, but my server hasn't been modified except by moonshine, and especially not since this problem started happening.  Any help you guys can provide would be appreciated! Thanks!

As an aside:  Is there a doc out there that explains how to properly configure Moonshine/ActionMailer/postfix/anything_else in order to send emails out from a moonshine-deployed server?

[Josh Sharpe]

Okay, after digging a lot, I've determined that the google/gmail servers in the error are simply there because I'm sending to a gmail address -- it has nothing to do with my server config.

If anyone's interested, I now have to make postm...@mydomain.com work in order to get my domain/IP off of the PBL Spamhaus list -- which is apparently a very normal process since the PBL pretty much blocks everyone by default.  E.g., nothing I did wrong.

Just curious to know if anyone else dealt with this problem?

[Andrew Roth]

Hi Josh,

My sense is that it's not a puppet or postfix issue really, but something else, possibly that your network/server has a bad reputation for spam and has been banned by gmail.  I think puppet did the job properly in setting everything up.  I would suggest you talk to your ISP and ask them what's going on.  For my work, we have a dedicated mail server I point all my rails apps to that is probably trusted more than any random server sending out emails.  It may not even be your apps at all, but somehow google is not pleased with the emails coming out of the server you use.

Maybe these will give some ideas:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=1f8350771690312b&hl=en
http://markmail.org/message/ssinqnq5tiehqe54?

-Andrew Roth

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 9:48 PM, Josh Sharpe <josh.m...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Josh Sharpe]

Andrew thanks for the reply.  See my second post on the subject:  I determined that I got on the PBL Spamhaus list here: http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/  -- which is apparently a pretty common thing per their description (nothing I did wrong), so I'm in the process of getting myself off of it.

[Andrew Roth]

Oh, I see your other message on the google groups page.  That's strange, your second message definitely didn't make it to my gmail inbox.  Ah well, glad you figured it out.

-Andrew

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