Can send by not receive email

David-Spring · August 21, 2021, 9:50pm

I have a Debian 10 VPS and set up a mail account for

For DNS, I have A records for both mail and webmail set to my VPS IP address. The MX record is set to mail.domain.com.

I have a Lets Encryp SSL for both domain.com and mai.domain.com

In my admin Hestia account, the Mail server is exim4 and the spam filter is spamassassin. The webmail alias is webmail. Spam Assassin is banning a lot of IP addresses. But it is not banning my IP address.

I can send mail from [email protected] but not recieve mail.

I have read the Hestia documentation on emails. I went to

My IP is not being blacklisted. However, I think the DMARC record is optional and I do not think this should prevent emails from being recieved.

I read the Hestia forum posts on this. There are no special characters in my domain name. I am not using Cloudflare. As suggested, SSH to

/var/log/exim4/mainlog

This was the error:

2021-08-21 11:39:28 1mHVtv-00043t-Q6 == [email protected] R=userforward defer (-1): failed to stat /var/spool/news/. (No such file or directory)

2021-08-21 11:43:04 1mHVtv-00043t-Q6 == [email protected] routing defer (-51): retry time not reached

I then checked to see if the mail folder news had been created correctly. I went to

/home/username/mail/domainname/ (mail folder)

There is a folder called news.

So I am wondering why Exim thinks there is not a directory for this email address.

I read several Exim tutorials but could not find a solution to this problem. Any advice or wisdom about how to solve this problem would be greatly appreciated.

eris · August 21, 2021, 10:05pm

I assume a user exists on the server:

news:x:9:9:news:/var/spool/news:/usr/sbin/nologin

Did you make any changes to exim config?

David-Spring · August 22, 2021, 1:52am

Yes, The user exists on the server. I then added the domain and the email to the Hestia User.
I do not know what you mean by
news:x:9:9:news:/var/spool/news:/usr/sbin/nologin

I did not make any changes to the exim config file.

Thanks for your help. I have spent several hours on this problem with no luck so far.

David-Spring · August 22, 2021, 5:09am

Upon further research, I was able to create an email address for a nearly identical website which had a different Hestia User. This second email address was able to send and receive emails. I therefore have spent hours looking for differences. Both Hestia users have the same settings and both websites are almost the same. So now I am really at a loss as to what the problem might be. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

eris · August 22, 2021, 5:35am

Is the email also [email protected]?

David-Spring · August 22, 2021, 5:42am

No. It is [email protected]… How can that make a difference?

David-Spring · August 22, 2021, 5:44am

I will set up the email [email protected] to see if that works. I should have mentioned that the second domain name is dot org rather than dot com.

David-Spring · August 22, 2021, 6:18am

How can this be… the email sent to [email protected] did not go through. But the email sent to [email protected] went through. How can it be that info on all sites works but news on all sites does not work???

eris · August 22, 2021, 7:52am

I think in Debian / Ubuntu news has a special meaning.

I am sure it has to do something with the config that news got treated different…

2021-08-22 07:51:09 1mHiG4-00053j-A9 == news@xxxxx R=userforward defer (-1): failed to stat /var/spool/news/. (No such file or directory)

eris · August 22, 2021, 8:21am

I think there is an option wrong in the exim config:

Have created a bug report will need to test few things if everything keeps worksing as intended…

github.com/hestiacp/hestiacp

[BUG] Exim does not allow the use of [email protected]

opened 08:20AM - 22 Aug 21 UTC

jaapmarcus

bug mail

**Describe the bug** 2021-08-22 07:51:09 1mHiG4-00053j-A9 <= jaap@xxxxx H=mail-…ej1-f45.xxxx P=esmtps X=TLS1.3:ECDHE_RSA_AES_128_GCM_SHA256:128 CV=no SNI="xxxxx" K S=3807 id=CAKCf7406PMLkF8oFncYLLuK0G5S=0xrRdYWEW-mz99suVzo+TQ@mail.gmail.com 2021-08-22 07:51:09 1mHiG4-00053j-A9 == news@xxxxx R=userforward defer (-1): failed to stat /var/spool/news/. (No such file or directory) **To Reproduce** What steps did you take when the issue occured? - Create mail domain - Create a mail account with the username "news" - Send mail from external server to the mail server - Check mainlog **Expected behavior** To be received / accepted in exim / user account. Changing username solves the issue **Operating system:** Ubuntu 20.04 and Debian 10 (Didn't test older versions) **Hestia Control Panel version:** 1.4.10 and 1.4.11 **Additional context** Using [email protected] works fine From exim documentation: check_local_user | Use: routers‡ | Type: boolean | Default: false When this option is true, Exim checks that the local part of the recipient address (with affixes removed if relevant) is the name of an account on the local system. The check is done by calling the getpwnam() function rather than trying to read /etc/passwd directly. This means that other methods of holding password data (such as NIS) are supported. If the local part is a local user, $home is set from the password data, and can be tested in other preconditions that are evaluated after this one (the order of evaluation is given in section 3.12). However, the value of $home can be overridden by router_home_directory. If the local part is not a local user, the router is skipped. If you want to check that the local part is either the name of a local user or matches something else, you cannot combine check_local_user with a setting of local_parts, because that specifies the logical and of the two conditions. However, you can use a passwd lookup in a local_parts setting to achieve this. For example: local_parts = passwd;$local_part : lsearch;/etc/other/users Note, however, that the side effects of check_local_user (such as setting up a home directory) do not occur when a passwd lookup is used in a local_parts (or any other) precondition. removing this option and remove allow_filters work fine. Need to verify if other functions still work.

David-Spring · August 23, 2021, 5:24pm

I want to thank the leaders of Hestia CP for filing a bug report and then fixing this problem. I know it is a minor issue but still very bothersome. I will test it once I get an updated version of Hestia.

system · September 22, 2021, 5:24pm

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