Articles in this section

Emails sent through a mailing list in Plesk to external mailboxes are not received: Relay access denied

Daniel Yordanov
Updated
Plesk for Linux kb: technical

Applicable to:

  • Plesk for Linux

Symptoms

  • Plesk Obisidian running on a Linux-based operating system

  • Emails sent through a mailing list (mailman) to external mailboxes (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo!, etc.) are not received

  • The messages do not appear to be leaving the Plesk server and one of the following error messages appears in /var/log/maillog:

    NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from localhost[::1]: 454 4.7.1 list@example.com: Relay access denied;
    from=list@example.com to=john_doe@example.net proto=ESMTP helo=<mail.example.com>

    NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from localhost[127.0.0.1]: 554 5.7.1

  • One of the following error messages appears in /var/log/mailman/smtp-failure:

    delivery to list@example.com failed with code -1: Server not connected
    delivery to john_doe@example.com failed with code -1: [Errno 104] Connection reset by peer

    delivery to john_doe@example.com failed with code 553: sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1)

Cause

The localhost IPv4 and IPv6 address ranges are not whitelisted within the mail server settings.

Resolution

Warning: To use mailing lists, you need to have localhost (IP ranges 127.0.0.0/8 and ::1/128) in the mail server's white list. However, to use outgoing mail control, you should not have localhost in the mail server white list. As a compromise, you can use mail forwarding on the mailbox instead of mailing lists.

The localhost IPv4 range  127.0.0.0/8 and IPv6 range ::1/128  must be added to the mail server white list in order for mailman to function as expected:

Warning: By applying the following solution, any set limits on outgoing mail will stop working and this is expected.

  1. Log into Plesk

  2. Go to Tools & Settings > Mail Server Settings > White List

  3. Press Add Network > add 127.0.0.0/8 to the IP address/mask field

  4. Press Add one more > enter ::1/128 to the IP address/mask field

  5. Press OK

  6. The end result should appear as follows:

In case the records exist already and the issue is still present, you must run the following command in order to reapply the currently defined mail server configuration:

# plesk repair mail -y

Mailman Limitations:

  • By default, the Mailman web interface in Plesk is secured with a self-signed SSL/TLS certificate. It protects the connection but triggers a self-signed SSL/TLS certificate warning. You can safely ignore the warning when you access the Mailman web interface. At the moment, it is not possible to secure the Mailman web interface with a valid SSL/TLS certificate.
  • At the moment, Mailman does not support ARC headers, therefore emails sent via Mailman cannot pass ARC checks. Some mail services (for example, Gmail) may treat such emails as unauthenticated.
  • The operating system dist-upgrade (for example, from Debian 10 to Debian 11) requires manual actions to upgrade to Mailman 3

Additional information

Mailing Lists | Plesk Obsidian documentation

Was this article helpful?

Comments

0 comments

Please sign in to leave a comment.