Today T-mobile SMTP server starts to validate sender domain for BIS accounts
We had a major software release to our ASP platform early this morning. The ASP services have been monitored closely by an internal Hobbit monitor. During the maintenance window or after, no alert emails ever reached our duty pager, a blackberry 7290 with a T-mobile BIS (Blackberry Internet Email) account. Other alert venues worked as usual. After checking around, I found that the culprit is tmo.blackberry.net, T-mobile’s SMTP server for its BIS accounts. Out of blue, it starts to validates sender domain this morning and rejects any email whose SENDER field fails the new validation. Also described below is how to fix it for Postfix.
The Hobbit Monitor runs on a CentOS 4.4 server. Due to restriction on corporate firewall, it couldn’t send outbound emails directly. Postfix is the MTA on this server. As a work-around, Postfix was configured to relay outbound emails destined to T-mobile BIS accounts through relay1.example.com, an internal email relay server capable of outbound-email. Here is how to configure Postfix to use different relay servers for specific recipient domains.
To troubleshoot, I checked the maillog on the Hobbit Monitor server. Per the log, the internal relay accepted the outbound emails as expected.
Feb 5 03:31:45 hobbitMonitor postfix/smtp[20122]: 2117E180C7F: to=<dutypager12345@tmo.blackberry.net>, orig_to=<alert1@localhost>, relay=relay1.example.com[10.8.8.8], delay=0, status=sent (250 ok 1170664215 qp 7753)
So, I followed the trail to relay1, which uses qmail as the MTA. I checked the remote queue. A bunch of ‘failure-notice’ were found, with error messages like this:
<dutypager12345@tmo.blackberry.net>:
Connected to 216.9.248.36 but sender was rejected.
Remote host said: 553 #5.1.8 Domain of sender address <greenbean@hobbitMonitor.example.com> does not exist
The same email alerts had no problem reaching the blackberry for over half a year now. So, it must be a policy change on T-mobile’s SMTP server which serves their BIS accounts. The change could result from an explicit policy change on the MTA itself, or an inadvertent change due to MTA software upgrade or new/extra/upgraded spam filters. The hobbitMonitor.example.com subdomain or host is resolvable internally, but not on the Internet. So, no surprise it fails the new validation.
Arguably, our Postfix configuration was broken with a non returnable email address as the sender, plus the server doesn’t expect to receive any inbound email anyway. The latter is the default behavior of MTA on a recent CentOS, Fedora Core, and RHEL. MTA will listen to TCP/25 only on the loopback interface for outbound email delivery only. As you can see, a lot of emails would stop to be delivered to T-mobile blackberries if such emails are sent from Linux servers who is not accessible or visible from the Internet. That’d be A LOT! You’d have expected some notification for such a maintenance from a large carrier such as T-Mobile. I guess not many places have decent configuration management or change control after all 
To fix it, it is rather simple with Postfix on the Hobbit Monitor server. I just need to change the $myorigin to equal to $mydomain instead of $myhostname, then to restart Postfix. So, the sender changed from “greenbean@hobbitMonitor.example.com” to “greenbean@example.com”.
For your quck reference, here is the excerpt of what $myorigin does in /etc/postfix/main.cf.
# SENDING MAIL
#
# The myorigin parameter specifies the domain that locally-posted
# mail appears to come from. The default is to append $myhostname,
# which is fine for small sites. If you run a domain with multiple
# machines, you should (1) change this to $mydomain and (2) set up
# a domain-wide alias database that aliases each user to
# user@that.users.mailhost.
#
# For the sake of consistency between sender and recipient addresses,
# myorigin also specifies the default domain name that is appended
# to recipient addresses that have no @domain part.
#
#myorigin = $myhostname
myorigin = $mydomain
Liz Cohen said,
February 12, 2007 @ 5:39 am
Hi
I noticed you write about Blackberries on your blog and thought I’d fill you in on Mobile Answers, a phone-friendly version of Answers.com for your Treo, Blackberry or any other smartphone.
Clarify unfamiliar terms you come across in emails from your phone. Settle trivia bets while you’re sitting at the bar. Get familiar with your surroundings on business trips. Mobile Answers is located at mobile.answers.com and makes available the massive, virtual library at Answers.com: 4 million topics, in your pocket, without any downloading.
Try it out, and if you like it, we’d love to see you blog about it. Feel free to pass this to fellow bloggers or submit your blog to the Answers.com Blog Directory.
Liz Cohen
Chief BlogWatcher
Answers.com(tm)”
Submit your blog to the Blog Directory.
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