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I've been trying to send mail to my new postfix configuration from my yahoo and gmail accounts and so far it has been nothing doing. On my Amazon Route 53 I have my mx record listed as:

1 mail.example.com

however, when I try to netcat:

nc mail.example.com 25

I get:

getaddrinfo: Name or Service not known

My domain was bought from NameCheap. Is there anything I have to do on that side? My website works flawlessly on Apache, but I don't even get errors in my mail log when sending with gmail and yahoo. I have ports 25 and 465 open on my EC2 server, but I do not have SSL or any kind of encryption scheme on my server.

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So what's the domain? It's kinda hard to check for errors if we don't know it :) –  Dennis Kaarsemaker Nov 13 '12 at 23:10
Do you have an A record or a CNAME record for mail.example.com? If not, having an MX record that points to mail.example.com isn't going to help very much. –  David Schwartz Nov 14 '12 at 0:01
@DavidSchwartz You're absolutely right. I did that and smooth sailing. Sven posted his answer a couple minutes before you did, but I sincerely appreciate your help. –  John Bowlinger Nov 14 '12 at 0:21
I really wish that people would stop obfuscating their domain name when they ask questions like this. It makes it a guessing game as to what the problem is and makes it near impossible to provide insightful answers. If your domain name is a secret and divulging that information is some kind of security risk in your view then you shouldn't "publish" any services to the internet and having a borked MX record is a moot point. –  joeqwerty Nov 14 '12 at 0:21
@joeqwerty but yet two people were able to pinpoint exactly what my problem was rendering your argument a moot point. I don't know about you but I try to be as transparent as possible on the world wide web. The last thing I need is some rogue hacker poking around my server for an open relay, because he sees some newb system administrator who can barely set up an mx record. –  John Bowlinger Nov 14 '12 at 1:34

1 Answer 1

up vote 0 down vote accepted

Some things to check:

  • You'll need an A or CNAME record for mail.example.com, naturally. I don't know Route 53 and if they check this when you enter the data.
  • DNS can take it's time to propagate everywhere (up to 24h in extreme cases).
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Man, you beat me to it! That's exactly what I was missing. Set up a mail.example.com subdomain A record with that pointing to my server elastic ip address. After that, all good! –  John Bowlinger Nov 14 '12 at 0:19

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