Tag Archives: Postfix

Postfix : TLS not working outside my network

As I just finished setting TLS and SASL to secure the access to my Postfix server, I realized that it was working only from inside my network.

What I got from my lan :

$ telnet mars 25
Trying 192.168.222.10...
Connected to phocean.net.
Connected to phocean.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 phocean.net ESMTP Postfix (Debian/GNU)
220 phocean.net ESMTP Postfix (Debian/GNU)
ehlo phocean.net
ehlo phocean.net
250-phocean.net
250-phocean.net
250-PIPELINING
250-SIZE 200000000
250-VRFY
250-ETRN
250-STARTTLS
250-AUTH NTLM DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-8BITMIME
250 DSN

I shows well that the TLS handshake is initiated.

But from this outside, I just got this weired thing :

$ telnet phocean.net 25

$ telnet phocean.net 25
Trying 81.64.194.119...
Connected to phocean.net.
Connected to phocean.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 **********************************************
ehlo phocean.net
ehlo phocean.net
502 5.5.2 Error: command not recognized


Of course, the firewall, a Cisco Pix one, was properly set to redirect port 25 UDP/TCP to my server.


However, I soon focused my effort on this equipment. I considered a while that the cause could be some filtering from my provider, but most probably, the problem came from the Pix.


That was not difficult to figure out : it had some protocol inspector activated for SMTP :


$ sh ru
[...]
fixup protocol smtp 25
[...]


Just after :


> no fixup protocol smtp 25


… it started to work perfectly well !!!


The engine for the SMTP protocol could not recognize the TLS handshake, considered that the SMTP session as not valid and therefore blocked it !


I can deactivate it without any fear as my Postfix server is already pretty well secured, or at least configured to reject any weired SMTP dialog.

Postfix : “error writing message: File too large”

I suddenly started to received some undelivered mail notifications while I was trying to send some messages to a mailbox hosted on my Postfix server.

The cause described in the notification was :

error writing message: File too large

The first thing I did was checking my configuration file, main.cf.
It seemed all right :

[...]
mailbox_size_limit = 0
message_size_limit = 200000000
[...]

Note that “0” means unlimited.
I checked the mailbox in question : it was nearing the size of 50 Mb.

I started to think that during some Postfix update, the meaning of the value “0” may have changed.
I tried different values without success.

I started to become crazy with that, but, finally, after quite a long time spent on google, I finally found the trick, which is just a simple line to add in main.cf :

virtual_mailbox_limit = 0

Indeed, I use virtual users as mail account ! I just never imagined there was a differtent setting for virtual users (which can be a convenient setting in some case).