The company I'm doing support work for has an odd setup -
(I'll make up some fictitious names since there may be security problems)
Their SHARK server hosts domains
www.thecompany.com, and
www.thesupportsite.com
They want to have people who have email accounts at @supportsite.com to be able to send emails to people at @thecompany.com
But...
www.thecompany.com, while hosted at the SHARK server, has its dns records at an older hosting service, OLDHOSTING.com
That doesn't seem to cause any problems, people can get to the website fine, since it was modified to point to the new server.
the exchange mail server for mail.thecompany.com, however, is at a different server, INOFFICE server
The MX settings are setup correctly for their dns, at OLDHOSTING.com, to point to "mail.thecompany.com", the exchange server at INOFFICE server
The mail for
www.thesupportsite.com is managed at the same server where its hosted, SHARK server.
I setup the resolvers at the SHARK server to use the open dns ips. That seems to work fine. Little slow, but works.
I followed directions for setting up an external mail server with exim. I removed thecompany.com from etc/localdomains, and added it to etc/remotedomains
doing a test on the SHARK server:
> exim -bt test@???
router = lookuphost, transport = remote_smtp
host mail.thecompany.com [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] MX=10
host mail2.thecompany.com [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] MX=20
It seems to resolve correctly. It gets the correct ip address to the exchange server at the INOFFICE server.
But, exim fails to deliver email to test@???
Error seems to be:
1 - test@??? R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp: retry time not reached for any host after a long failure period
Why is it failing to reach the mail server? It gets the correct ip address. Its trying to deliver by remote_smtp. Email gets sent fine to xxx@??? from any other domain, such as gmail or yahoo.
I'm about to tell them "I dunno. You'll have to hire a guru". This problem has me baffled.
