I have a situation when forwarding from postfix mail server to yahoo,gmail,aol,icloud and many others forwarded email delivery to major ESP stopped at once though it works for my company email and the emails that are not being forwarded like if i send direct email to gmail or yahoo or one of the ESP that are not working with forwarding. The telnet is working and trace route is also working fine to the IPs of the email servers that are blocking forwarded emails. What about forwarded email could be different?
In mail Queue
May 10 09:36:43 apollo postfix/smtp[18975]: connect to alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[173.194.70.26]:25: Connection timed out
May 10 09:36:56 apollo postfix/smtp[18971]: connect to alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[173.194.70.26]:25: Connection timed out
May 10 09:44:25 apollo postfix/smtp[21829]: connect to alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[173.194.70.26]:25: Connection timed out
telnet 173.194.70.26 25
Trying 173.194.70.26...
Connected to 173.194.70.26.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mx.google.com ESMTP m7si2343689eeu.50 - gsmtp
Trace Route
traceroute -n 173.194.70.26
traceroute to 173.194.70.26 (173.194.70.26), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 91.222.8.2 10.908 ms 10.796 ms 6.024 ms
2 149.11.44.33 154.689 ms 154.571 ms 154.534 ms
3 154.54.57.49 10.415 ms 5.663 ms 154.54.56.77 9.353 ms
4 154.54.72.185 9.425 ms 154.54.57.113 9.443 ms 154.54.74.57 9.997 ms
5 154.54.61.150 9.508 ms 154.54.62.66 9.274 ms 154.54.61.150 9.397 ms
6 149.6.146.30 24.312 ms 18.781 ms 18.532 ms
7 209.85.255.78 31.088 ms 5.474 ms 5.020 ms
8 209.85.253.92 21.222 ms 209.85.253.90 4.794 ms 4.244 ms
9 209.85.240.28 10.956 ms 209.85.243.33 10.844 ms 10.491 ms
10 209.85.241.229 114.587 ms 209.85.241.227 17.799 ms 17.341 ms
11 209.85.254.116 118.049 ms 117.776 ms 209.85.254.112 120.510 ms
12 * * *
13 173.194.70.26 36.807 ms 36.536 ms 44.576 ms
What could be the reason when forward mail is in the queue, it gets connection timeout and rest of the emails are working fine. How postfix handles the forwarded emails?
Best Answer
It had nothing to do with the Postfix. It was firewall blocking the postfix user to communicate with port 25.
The csf has SMTP BLOCK configuration and that configuration was messed up. As postfix runs with with the postfix user, the csf had made root user owner of the port 25 so no user other than root could sent the emails but forwarded emails were being sent as postfix user. So adding postfix to the port 25 owners, the issue was resolved.