E-Commerce Development

Our company offers hosting, we currently have around 50 websites on our server. 3 of our customers have elected to have their email hosted on another server to help reduce spam. After changing the DNS settings for those 3 domains, we began getting failure messages when trying to send email from other domains on our server. Turns out it was a qmail issue.

Here is an example of the failure messages we were getting:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at ip-xx.xx.xx.xxx .ip.secureserver.net.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

Then the email address of the recipient was followed by this line:

This address no longer accepts mail.

After googling the error, we were able to come up with a solution. Turns out, you have to remove the domains in two files and restart qmail.

To resolve the problem you have to remove the domain from /var/qmail/control/rcpthosts and /var/qmail/control/virtualdomains.

After that you have to restart the qmail by /etc/init.d/qmail restart

It worked for us!

Just a hint when changing IP Addresses for a live domain.

Change the settings of your nameservers first with your registrar. (NS and NS2, Etc.)

Then change your IP address in your hosting control panel such as Plesk.

By changing IP address assignments this way, I have found that propagation turns out to be much quicker than the expected 24 hours. Many of mine I have seen change almost instantly. If I change it first in the hosting panel, it turns out to take much longer for propagation.