Internal email not sending?

aleco · 23 Apr 2010 at 18:43

Hi all,

I've got a VPS server running on CentOS (4.8 I think) which runs my email. Yesterday, it was offline for some reason and came back to life early this morning (I've no idea why, the hosts are useless). Anyway, I noticed that I can't send emails to myself today (i.e. to [email protected] from [email protected]) using either a mail client, or from the webmail hosted on the server. I'm not getting emails from WHM either.
However...I am able to send email to other accounts like gmail, and to receive email from gmail. So I'm guessing something is going wrong with internal emails?

I'm not sure if this is linked to the crash or is something else, but does anyone have any idea how to start going about correcting this?! :confused:

edit: just to clarify, the email appears to be sending, just never arrives. I've even turned SpamAssassin off but no help either.

Spooter · 23 Apr 2010 at 21:31

Are you able to tail any of the mail logs and see what they say?

tail -f /var/log/mail.log

tail -f /var/log/system.log

aleco · 24 Apr 2010 at 00:28

I couldn't find those exact log names, but found a maillog and an exim_mainlog file so tailed those. I'm far from being anywhere decent with linux, but tried my best lol - I got both logs up and then sent an email to my account. One from the address I was sending it to, and another from my gmail account. The gmail one came through, but the other didn't. Even when I sent to my whitelisted email addy, it didn't come through. Also, sending from one email address on the domain to another doesn't work (eg [email protected] to [email protected]).

Anyway, here's the output of the logs of what I thought were the relevant bits when I sent the emails (I had spamassassin back on, but it was sent to a subdomain address which shouldn't be affected by the filter):

from my email to the same email (didn't appear in my inbox): maillog:
<edited out>

same thing but in exim_mainlog:
<edited out>

this one was from gmail to my email, and it showed up in my inbox:
maillog:
<edited out>

exim_mainlog:
<edited out>

Not sure if it is significant or not, but the gmail one took longer to appear in the logs, so I included the bits that appeared from after the mail sent my mailbox.

I've x'd out my ip and stuff.

The two lines which looks like the root of the problem are:

from exim_mainlog from mysite email:

Code:

2010-04-23 23:59:05 1O5Rpj-0000tq-0k => /dev/null <[email protected]> R=central_filter T=**bypassed**

and

from exim_mainlog from gmail:

Code:

2010-04-24 00:04:09 1O5Ruc-0007jL-9y => aleco <[email protected]> R=virtual_user T=virtual_userdelivery

As the one that doesn't get delivered mentions /dev/null which is where deleted stuff ends up right?

aleco · 24 Apr 2010 at 12:19

Ah finally solved it! I removed the filter file found in /etc/vfilters for the domain I was having problems with, and it seems to have fixed it! Not quite sure why though as I've not changed that file for months...but oh well!