Disappearing emails

[rfwilliams777]

I am running 10.19 Enterprise with MXScan (although most of the features are disabled) with a considerable amount of manual filters set up in ME. But this week there have been a very noticeable issues with multiple clients I have.
1) Very common, anyone emailing from a gmail account (or an account hosted by Google) seems to be deleted. Every time I look this issue up, it is always an IP address is on SORBS and whatnot. But regardless, I have had filters for years that any gmail email is allowed to come through (bypass filters) and this is set up in ME. After a number of things, I simply disabled SORBS in ME to see if that will resolve the issue. BTW, if a spam score reaches to a certain level, the email is just deleted.
2) Emails coming in could be from clean IPs are seen in the SMTP logs (I can see the entries in the message tracker) and I see the entry where it says by pass filters or routed out of the filters, but nonetheless the emails do not arrive either in the Inbox or in the Junk email folder. Again, I suspect SORBS but I disabled that this evening so I do not know if that really helped with that issue.
3) Finally a very odd issue, emails are truly leaving my server. I can see in the logs the communication between my server and the recipients server. There are no kickbacks, but some emails from some people (varying domains) emailing to various domains NEVER arrive. I have checked and my domains, IP addresses, etc. are not on any blacklists, reputation is decent, and nothing has changed at all manually or mechanically on the server during this week (other than me having to make modifications due to these phone calls of issues). Even earlier today a client sent a message to multiple people (about 8 people) and no one got it. The message left the Outbox, it is in the sent folder, I can see in the logs that it left, but it does not arrive at those people's servers.

Any thoughts to this? At first I just blew it off as a singular anomaly, but multiple clients are now saying this.

[MailEnable-Ian]

Hi,

1) Very common, anyone emailing from a gmail account (or an account hosted by Google) seems to be deleted. Every time I look this issue up, it is always an IP address is on SORBS and whatnot. But regardless, I have had filters for years that any gmail email is allowed to come through (bypass filters) and this is set up in ME. After a number of things, I simply disabled SORBS in ME to see if that will resolve the issue. BTW, if a spam score reaches to a certain level, the email is just deleted.

So did disabling the reverse DNS blacklists resolve the problem? You mentioned that the gmail was allowed, do you mean you whitelisted the domain or range of IP addresses? Can you provide detail. As for the spam score problem you may have a filter that executes on the spam score to delete the message. Tracing through the logs will help.

2) Emails coming in could be from clean IPs are seen in the SMTP logs (I can see the entries in the message tracker) and I see the entry where it says by pass filters or routed out of the filters, but nonetheless the emails do not arrive either in the Inbox or in the Junk email folder. Again, I suspect SORBS but I disabled that this evening so I do not know if that really helped with that issue.

Really need to the logs and details of some of the messages that never arrived. The best way forward here would be to lodge a support ticket and provide the relevant information.

3) Finally a very odd issue, emails are truly leaving my server. I can see in the logs the communication between my server and the recipients server. There are no kickbacks, but some emails from some people (varying domains) emailing to various domains NEVER arrive. I have checked and my domains, IP addresses, etc. are not on any blacklists, reputation is decent, and nothing has changed at all manually or mechanically on the server during this week (other than me having to make modifications due to these phone calls of issues). Even earlier today a client sent a message to multiple people (about 8 people) and no one got it. The message left the Outbox, it is in the sent folder, I can see in the logs that it left, but it does not arrive at those people's servers.

Any thoughts to this? At first I just blew it off as a singular anomaly, but multiple clients are now saying this.

If the SMTP log files report that the message was dispatched and a success on the QUIT command after the data was transmitted then the issue here is either going to be on the receiving server side or a proxy sitting in between.

[rfwilliams777]

Concerning the first issue mentioned, PTR was enabled and because gmail does not do that and anyone hosting with those providers don't have PTR records it was causing the emails to not be sent or received (as far as I know of). Which then this means that all the spam filtering does it in and out and not just in? If so, can that be changed to spam filter only one or the other (more importantly in, I can throttle outbound amounts)?

Disabling SORBS seems to resolve some of the issues; however, SORBS does an effective job with catching spam the other filters do not (why I do not know). Please also note that other than Country filtering, MXScan is completely shut down and I am relying more of ME to do all the work. I had placed a suggestion in the forum for what would be much needed since MXScan no longer exists. Sadly, SORBS seems to be the primary culprit but SORBS is an effective blacklist that I do not like not having that one running. I have four DNS blacklist and 3 URBL blacklists. I also installed SpamAssasin in a seperate install that is working with ME (you can see the SPAM status thingy to see it is scanning stuff).

I will be happy for you to review the server and make any suggestions or improvements as you see fit. You will also see NUMEROUS filters based on sender, subject, and body. It has helped a lot (or I assume it works over the other in-line filters) but I am still dealing with some issues with some spam still getting in. It is disappointing that someone says the email gets redirected (or copied) from the ME account to Gmail and Gmail is catching the spam that goes through (what ME did not catch). I can add the other blacklists but I think that restricted things down so much that people could not get much emails in and out (again, though, I had PTR enabled so that could had singlely been the issue). Let me know if you want me to open a ticket.

[rfwilliams777]

UPDATE:
I have had to turn off Bayesian because for some reason it was deleting SEVERAL (from two customers who reported, so no telling how much more) good emails because of their subject.
I am still concerned that SORBS may be an issue and either I am getting some spam in that used to be blocked before or emails are just not coming in and no one knows they are missing until someone calls or texts "did you get my email". I have clients whose businesses rely on emails for contracts in the millions with safety also being a concern. I cannot keep playing guesses with turning things off and on without knowing if things are really working.