Re: mail looping with same server

Luke Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
> This Qmail server is the secondary MX record to the primary mail server for
> this domain. It’s job is to queue messages when the primary mail server is
> down and store them until it is back up and then deliver them.
> 
> There are 2 of these qmail servers behind a load balancer. Qmail is trying
> to deliver the message to the load balanced IP address which comes back to
> the same server, this continues until it errors,
> "554_too_many_hops,_this_message_is_looping” and bounces the message.

The problem is that you've got qmail delivering mail to an IP address that
belongs to the same machine that qmail is running on (i.e. traffic to that
address ends up at the qmail server - I know it's indirectly through the load
balancer, but that doesn't matter) but qmail doesn't know that address is
part of that server, so it doesn't avoid sending to that address.

Scott Gifford's moreipme patch was designed for situations such as these.
Apply the patch, and list all IP addresses which indirectly map to the server
in the appropriate control file.
https://lists.gt.net/qmail/users/73878

Another thing you can do is, on the "secondary" MX machines, don't have them
rely on DNS MX records to know where to forward the mail to.  Hardcode the
address to deliver those messages in qmail's control files.

Charles
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