problem sending email to customer with inhouse email server

[Salem_Kayaker]

Let's see if I can explain the situation clearly.

I have a WHM/Reseller account.

Under that Reseller Account I have two domains. One is my main business website (say, mywebsite.com) and I have a customer website (say, customer.com).

The customer has an inhouse MS Exchange server with its own dedicated IP address. So, in WHM, I create MX records to point at:

smtp.customer.com
mail2.customer.com

and I create A records for smtp.customer.com and mail2.customer.com which both point at the same dedicated IP address.

This works fine for the customer's inhouse users and just about anyone else on the planet sending email to the customer.

But I have problems, presumably because my mail domain is on the same server as the customers' website. If I use my mywebsite.com smtp server to send an email to, say, support@customer.com it does not get delivered to their inhouse MS Exchange server, instead it is treated as unrouted mail on our common web server and ends up in the customer.com catchall account (or :blackhole: ) depending on how I set up the defaul email.

If anyone has a suggestion as to how I can get my outgoing email to get out of our webserver and delivered to the customers' inhouse mail server, it would be greatly appreciated.

[One idea, of course, is to use a smtp server other than the one on our common webserver... Unfortunately, my ISP's smtp server won't allow outgoing emails with a return address other than my ISP mail account.]

TIA,

--Doug Denholm

[joel69]

Try disabling all mail features for the hosting account for customer.com

[nickp666]

you need to remove them from /etc/localdomains and add them to /etc/secondarymx and make sure you have correct dns records for their mail server addresses

[verdon]

There's a couple good threads on the subject here and here

[chirpy]

Yup. But as a reseller, you are going to have to ask your hosting provider to do this for you.

[cssystems]

Put domain on sepearate IP, this should help!

[chirpy]

No, it won't.

You have to have the domain removed from /etc/localdomains and added to /etc/remotedomains (which may need creating) for this to work.

[Salem_Kayaker]

I did get this resolved. And, as others have suggested, I had to have changes made in the /etc directory by the hosting service support folks (since, as a reseller, I do not have priviledges on that directory).

This is a minor deficiency in cPanel... It is relatively rare to have the mail servers on a different server and IP address from the website.

Would WHM have the necessary priviledges to make changes in the /etc directory? If so, then cPanel may want to have the Zone Records interface make those changes when appropriate.

[My customer site did have a separate, dedicated IP address from my site and I still had the problem with the mis-directed emails since they shared the same shared-hosting server.]


--Doug
Salem Design