Fix 503 AUTH first (#5.5.1) mail receive errors in Qmail

Friday, 2nd September 2011

I have one qmail rocks install based on Thibbs Qmalrocks tutorial

I had to do some changes, to:
/etc/service/qmail-smtpd/run and /etc/service/qmail-smtpdssl/run init scripts.

After a qmail restart suddenly qmail stopped receiving any mail messages and my sent messages was returned with an error:

Connected to xx.xxx.xx.xx but sender was rejected.
Remote host said: 503 AUTH first (#5.5.1)

After investigating the issue I finally found, that one value I’ve changed in /etc/service/qmail-smtpd/run and /etc/service/qmail-smtpdssl was causing the whole mess:

The problematic variable was:

REQUIRE_AUTH=1

To solve the issue I had to disable the value which it seems, I have enabled by mistake.

Below is a quote from http://qmail.jms1.net which explains what REQUIRE_AUTH shell variable does:

Setting REQUIRE_AUTH=1 will make the service not accept ANY mail unless the client has sent a valid AUTH command. This also prevents incoming mail from being accepted for your own domains, so do not use this setting if the service is accepting “normal” mail from the outside world.
Restarting via qmailctl restart and qmail started receiving messages normal 😉

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3 Responses to “Fix 503 AUTH first (#5.5.1) mail receive errors in Qmail”

  1. Thibs says:
    Firefox 6.0.1 Firefox 6.0.1 Windows XP Windows XP
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:6.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0.1

    Thanks for the advertising for my guide 😉

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    • admin says:
      Firefox 3.6.17 Firefox 3.6.17 Ubuntu 8.04 Ubuntu 8.04
      Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110422 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.6.17

      You’re very welcome. Your guide is a great resource with a lot of potential. And I’m noticing lately less and less information on Qmail is available online. So your guide fills up a good gap and I wish you a lot of success with i 😉

      And will be seeing you around

      Best,
      Georgi

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  2. Nichol Shackle says:
    Firefox 3.0.14 Firefox 3.0.14 Windows XP Windows XP
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009082707 Firefox/3.0.14 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

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