Cpanel, Exim - Email is frozen in the mailq

[PaulH]

Please help.

I have recently setup a VPS with cpanel and moved about 16 accounts form another server. It would appear that 15 of the accounts moved just fine but one of them was a nightmare.

The account seems to have some issues with email. All of the email to users within the account is frozen in the mailq. The users can access thier email through webmail and imap, but they never get new email -- even the test email. I look at the mail queue and I see all fo the test emails I have sent.

Any insight as to what is wrong, please let me know.

Thanks,
Paul

[rainboy]

As you say all Internal emails are not deliverd, are you sure that that your mail services are both running ? did you install a firewall blocking anything ? did you update your MX record in DNS to the correct server?

Kindest regards,
Patrick
p/s a support ticket to JPC support might be faster as you can give more details and they can look on the machine.

[PaulH]

First let me thank you for your reply.


MX Record Seem to be working (I tested it from a different network to make sure that the dns is not only working locally):

collin ~ # dig domain.com -t mx
; <<>> DiG 9.3.2 <<>> domain.com -t mx
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 6128
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;domain.com.               IN      MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
domain.com.        3175    IN      MX      0 domain.com.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
domain.com.        3175    IN      NS      ns1.nameserver.com.
domain.com.        3175    IN      NS      ns2.nameserver.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
domain.com.        3175    IN      A       69.73.184.30

;; Query time: 69 msec
;; SERVER: 208.201.224.11#53(208.201.224.11)
;; WHEN: Sun Jul  2 14:02:49 2006
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 108

All of the known required services seem to be working as yo can see below I am able to verify that my SMTP, POP, etc are accessible from outside of the box. I also have a list of the running mail services as well.) It all looks fine to me, unless I am blind to somehting obvious.

collin ~ # telnet domain.com 25
Trying 69.73.184.30...
Connected to domain.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220-vps.mydomain.com ESMTP Exim 4.52 #1 Sun, 02 Jul 2006 13:36:55 -0700 
220-We do not authorize the use of this system to transport unsolicited, 
220 and/or bulk e-mail.
^]
telnet> quit
Connection closed.

collin ~ # telnet domain.com 110
Trying 69.73.184.30...
Connected to domain.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
+OK Hello there.
^]
telnet> quit
Connection closed.

root@vps [~]# ps -ef
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
...
root     27799     1  0 Jul01 ?        00:00:00 chkservd
cpanel   28226     1  0 Jul01 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/stunnel-4.15local /usr/
root     28239     1  0 Jul01 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/saslauthd -m /var/run/
...
root      7688     1  0 01:05 ?        00:00:00 xinetd -stayalive -pidfile /var/
mailnull 21864     1  0 03:07 ?        00:00:03 /usr/sbin/exim -bd -q60m
mailnull 21878     1  0 03:07 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/exim -tls-on-connect -
...
root     32709     1  0 03:11 ?        00:00:01 /usr/bin/spamd -d --allowed-ips=
...
mailnull  4094     1  0 03:12 ?        00:00:00 eximstats
mailman   5144     1  0 03:12 ?        00:00:00 /usr/local/bin/python2.4 /usr/lo
...
mailman   5181  5144  0 03:12 ?        00:00:00 /usr/local/bin/python2.4 /usr/lo
root     19973     1  0 03:30 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/courierlogger -pid=/va
root     19974 19973  0 03:30 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/courier-imap/libexec/co
root     20018 20012  0 03:30 ?        00:00:00 /usr/libexec/courier-authlib/aut
root     28596 20014  0 03:54 ?        00:00:00 /etc/authlib/authProg
...
root     32191 19993  0 13:37 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/courier-imap/sbin/pop3l
mailnull  1619 21864  1 13:38 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/exim -bd -q60m
..
root@vps [~]#

Firewall? Yes I have iptables running but the other accounts on the server see to working find in reagards to email. I also am allowing traffic to all standard email related ports for imap, pop, and SMTP. I have tested these by using other accounts and using telnet (as seen above.)

[rainboy]

Hi PaulH,

You are most welcome, just trying to help here.

If i understand it correctly, you can receive and send mail from other domains, can you also send mail out to external domains from this particular domain ? i.e. send to your own mail account on another server i.e. hotmail or gmail.

Did you try to run a service like dnsreport.com to find any flaws in the DNS setup for the domain giving the problem ? i find it often very helpful in tracing problems.

Kindest regards,
Patrick

[PaulH]

Thanks again Patrick

I have used dnsreport.com and dnsstuff.com in the past but didn't for this particulat issue yet, mostly because the email is making it to the server just not to the inbox. It may be a DNS issue after all, but I don't have too many data points to believe that just yet.

Because of your suggestion I tried sending email from the problematic account to my gmail account and it worked but when I replied I never received the email. here is where is get strange. The email that I sent from my gmail account is sitting in the mailq in a frozen state and has not nor will be delivered to the inbox -- that seem to be where the issue lies. It would seem that it is eather a file permissions problem, misconfigured exim server, or
(to your point) an internal dns issue that I can't see as of yet.

I contacted support and they said they fixed the permissions and that the problem should work, but I have yet to see email in the accounts inbox. I am sure someone smarter than I will have the insight and experience to get this fixed. Does any of this give you any mor insight on what could be the problem?

I appreciate your suggestions and help in this matter.

Thanks,
Paul

[rainboy]

Okay getting more clear to me now, it indeed can not be an MX related or DNS related issue if the mails do get to the server and stay in the inbox instead of being moved to the clients inbox.

Did you try to release the queue in WHM after support did set the correct rights. Or maybe even stop/start the mail services, to see if then everything starts to process?

I remember did have a similar issue before, which also was a problem with rights on only one account. Trying to look it up, but JPC's website seems to be completely unresponsive at this time. Will try later.

[rainboy]

okay tried to look it up, it seems i did have the same problem 'Robert' did then solve it for me, but didnt give me the information i needed to tell you HOW he did fix it. But from his tickets i guess it was a permission isue as well. So just give JPC a mail account userid and password to test with, and they fix it for you. (atleast they did for me).

Kindest regards,
Patrick

[PaulH]

I am glad that I am not the only one.

Originally Andrew and I separately reset the mail permissions using WHM but that didn't work. Here was a snipit from the ticket to Andrew.

I used the fix permissions tool in WHM, but I am not sure what good it does. Are there still permision problems?

One thing that may be nice to know while troubleshooting this is that this new server is using maildir and the old used mbox for storing mail. When I did the account restore from a full backup it converted the files form mbox to maildir. One thing that was different between this account and others is that I moved a couple of larger (300MB+) mbox files over manually into each account and then ran the /scripts/maildirmenu script (option #3). I moved these large files manually because the other cpanel server could not backup th whole account because it was so large and kept timing out.

I gave them the account information and Robert told me that he tried to rerun the tool and see if he could get it going but wasn't able to find out what was wrong so he escalated the issue to a Senior Administrator.

Then Veena told me that the firewall was reset and then resolve.conf was fixed (restored to the original jag nameservers.) From that point the email started to flow. I am still a little bit confused as to what it was exactly but the best news here is that it works.

Thanks so much for you support.

I will say this though: the JPC support is really good. I am so glad that I chose to go with JPC. Not only were they friendly, but they were quick and communicated very well. Through this whole experience my confidence in this company grew and I would recommend this company and its services to anyone.

Thanks again everyone.