Needed: linux mail clue (postfix)

[drwex]

For some reason, outbound mail from my home server has stopped working. Mostly. Inbound is clearly working but outbound seems to fail silently. I can't figure out where the failure is occurring. Looking in /var/log/maillog I see outbound traffic lines like this:

Apr 1 17:01:01 hovir postfix/smtp[17121]: C738A74343: to=<ringel@****.org>, relay=smtp.mail.****.net[207.172.****.99], delay=1, status=sent (250 ok: Message 392262033 accepted)

(I have put **** in place of actual domain names/IPs for privacy purposes. The correct names/IPs appear in the log file.)

I interpret this to mean that outbound mail from my machine was accepted. Is there something I should be looking for to indicate failure?

EDIT 1: my current theory is that my ISP is blackholing me, presumably because it somehow thinks I'm a spam source. I'd love to find another outbound mail relay to point at so I can test this but then I'd have to figure out how to repointer postfix. It's been a lot of years since I frobbed this thing. :(

EDIT 2: frobzwiththingz: i sent you two test messages, one from gmail and one from hovir.

EDIT 3: well, props to RCN, they didn't treat me like a freak and I got to talk to someone who does understand the basics of SMTP. He's never heard of Postfix, but he didn't blink when I told him it was running of an old Red Hat linux box. Ticket is opened and kicked upstairs to their engineering. Now we wait.

Comments

[ckd]

Yeah, the other end accepted the message based on the 250 response code; whether they're clogged up, misconfigured, or intentionally dropping messages is not determinable.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

my current theory is that my ISP is blackholing me, presumably because it somehow thinks I'm a spam source. I'd love to find another outbound mail relay to point at so I can test this but then I'd have to figure out how to repointer postfix. It's been a lot of years since I frobbed this thing. :(

That does sound like the most plausible explanation. I had to remind myself how to do this a couple of months ago when I was in the same situation, and the answer was to update the values of the "relayhost" variable in main.cf, and the matching entry in the "transport" file (which also has to be rebuild with postmap).

Either way, I would grit my teeth and talk to RCN technical support to see if you can get someone to explain why your outgoing mail is getting dropped. If you keep escalating you should eventually get someone who knows how to find out what's going on. It'll take a while but I don't see what long-term alternative you have...

[drwex]

Yeah, looking in main.cf I see that
relayhost = smtp.rcn.com

and the file "transport" appears to be a man page rather than a config file of any kind.