Fixing QMAIL mail server SMTP auto-configure
issues in Thunderbird and other mail IMAP / POP3 mobile
clients
One of the QMAIL mail servers, setup-uped on a Debian host has been
creating some auto configuration issues. Everytime a new mail user
tries to use the embedded Thunderbird client auto configuration,
the auto config fails leaving the client unable to use his Mailbox
through POP3 or IMAP protocols.
Since about 2 years Thunderbird and many other modern
pop3
and
imap mail desktop and mobile clients are by default
using the auto configuration and hence it was unthinkable to
manually change settings for new clients with the QMAIl install;
Besides that most of the Office users are always confused, whether
they have to manually change SMTP or POP3 host for a server.
Below is a screenshot displaying the warning during email
auto-configuration:
The orange color in the button for the newly auto-detected
smtp.mail-domain.com indicates, something is not right with
the SMTP host.
Obviously, something was wrong with
smtp.mail-domain.com,
hence I checked where
smtp.mail.domain.com resolves with
host command. What I found was actually
smtp.mail-domain.com Active ( A ) DNS records was
pointing to an IP address, our company previously used for the mail
server. At present time the correct mail server host name is
mx.mail-domain.com and the QMAIL installation on
mx.soccerfame.com is configured to be the actual SMTP server.
By default
Thunderbird and many other POP3, IMAP mail
clients, however automatically assume the default SMTP host for a
mail server is to be configured under a host name
smtp.mail-domain.com. This is really strange, especially
when the primary MX record for
mail-domain.com domain is
pointing to
mx.mail-domain.com, e.g.:
qmail:~# host -t MX mail-domain.com
soccerfame.com mail is handled by 10 mx.mail-domain.com.
soccerfame.com mail is handled by 20 mail.mail-domain.com.
soccerfame.com mail is handled by 30
mail-domain.com.
The whole warning was caused due to the fact
mx.mail-domain.com was resolving to an IP like
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, whether
smtp.mail-domain.com was
resolving to
yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy
Both
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and
yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy hosts were
configured to have a different qmail SMTP host i.e.:
The server under IP
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx - (mx.mail-domain.com)
was confiugred in
/var/qmail/control/me to be
mx.mail-domain.com and the other old one
yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy
- (mail.mail-domain.com) had (mail.mail-domain.com) in
/var/qmail/control/me
As smtp.mail-domain.com was actually being still resolved to
mail.mail-domain.com, the EMAILs were improperly trying to
be sent with a configured DNS hostname of
smtp.mail-domain.com, where the actual one on the server was
mail.mail-domain
It took, me about an hour of pondering what is causing the oddities
until I got the here explained issue. As the DNS recors for the
domain the sample
mail-domain.com were handled by
Godaddy, to fix the mess, I logged in to Godaddy and;
a)
deleted the A DNS record for
smtp.mail-domain.com.
b)
Created new CNAME record for smtp.mail-domain.com to be a
domain alias for mx.soccerfame.com
A few minutes, afterwards I tried configuring once again the same
email account in Thunderbird and this time both
imap.mail-domain.com and smtp.mail-domain.com blinked green
indicating everything is configured fine.
To be 100% sure all is working fine I first fetched, all email via
the IMAP protocol without hassles and onwards sent a test email to
my Gmail account; thanksfully the sent email was delivered to Gmail
indicating both Get Mail and Send Mail functions worked now
fine.