cPanel Bug: exim doesn't use account IP address for forwarded emails

[brianoz]

Just found out to my distress that forwarded emails ALWAYS use the default server IP, rather than using the account IP.

I have the "Send mail from account’s dedicated IP" enabled in WHM's Exim Configuration Editor, and outgoing email sent via SMTP correctly uses the account IP.

I've edited /etc/mailips and I can add a line like "*: 1.2.3.4" at the end and it actually does use that IP. Looks like it is using the sender's email address to look up the IP address rather than the forwarder's email address. This could be a temporary workaround if there are issues, but it's not the right fix.

This is actually a serious problem in the day and age of sender reputation scoring. We recently had one of our domains forwarding email to an educational institution in the US. Turned out most of the email for that domain was spam (to the order of 2,000 a day!). This caused our main server outgoing IP to be listed with a poor reputation and as a result, outgoing email problems ensued. We lost a lot of outgoing email and had many user complaints - understandably!

Had the email been correctly forwarded from the account IP, only a few accounts would have been affected, and I would have been very happy.

Now that reputation scoring is being affected, so long as this is broken, we are at risk of email being substantially affected by a user's actions. This is obviously a risk we need to address urgently!

Here's another link explaining a discussion on this nearly 2 years ago: http://forums.cpanel.net/f43/can-exi...ss-122657.html

What about it cPanel?

(By the way - this is a bug as it isn't documented, and can have serious impact)

[brianoz]

This is with 11.30.3 on 28 Sept 2011 - so it's a current problem ...

[Infopro]

Have you filed a defect report on this? http://go.cpanel.net/bugs

[brianoz]

defect report just filed is: 1902810
(and have added a link to this post for discussion)

[cpanelkenneth]

This is fixed in cPanel & WHM 11.32

[brianoz]

Awesomely Impressive effort guys! Will verify it for you as it hits our servers, thanks.