UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? Email on a Windows Server

I am usign ahost, discountasp.net that is great but I have a problem using the email feature of UBB. I have tried setting the smtp server to localhost at their suggestion to no avail. Everyth=ime I try to register a user and the system tries to email a registration notice, it fails with this error message:

Unable to connect to the SMTP server. The following error was returned: Unknown error The server either does not exist, or rejected the connection. Please ensure that the UBB is allowed to relay mail through the server.

My provider does not know what to tell me put in the smtp setting to make it work. I am sure there must be other UBB users running on a windows host, any help would be appreciated.

That error means that there was no SMTP server present on port 25. If your host has no clue what their SMTP server name is, then they might not have one. In which case, you're out of luck.

May I advise not using a "discount" host?

try mail.yourdomian.com(net)(org)(whatever)

sometimes they will have set that up to foward to the appropriate server.

either that or webmail.yourdomain.com(ditto)

check your DNS records section of your control panel if you have one.

It should be localhost, but they may have it set to require authentication in which case you'll need to pass a username and password. It's also possible that they have a separate server that uses the IP range to determine who is allowed to relay through it. If they can't tell you then you have the wrong host. Using your sites MX record (mail.yoursite.com) isn't going to work unless they specifically gave you the domain name with the hosting and an e-mail server.

Again that would mean that they would have given you the proper information to begin with.

the way mine has it set up (or my old host.. I haven't checked with DP yet) was that the MX record wasn't really an MX record and was CNAME'd to a separate system (which I guess had an MX record). I would have thought that they could just put the IP for the mail-server as the MX record, but for some reason that wasn't how they set it up. That's why I say to check the DNS records.

Remember though, I'm as much a newbie as I am a dolt, so listening to me could also be a bad thing.

after looking at their prices, I've noticed that they aren't much lower than most hosts, worse case you switch hosts to one that supports at least smtp.

If you don't need the asp, asp.net, or other usually Windows only support, you could go with Unix or Linux and use Sendmail.

I own my own names and determine what my MX is. I guess letting someone else do these things for you would lead to confusion for some people. Either way that host is not ptoviding the info they should. I'd have to wonder about the reliability and security of the servers they run. Windows or *nix, doesn't matter. If they aren't run properly then you're going to get haxxored and have downtime or worse....someone will get your data.

As a web developer, I really need ASP.Net as well as UBB support. There must be some provider out there who supports both. If anyone knows of such a host, please let me know.

If you're looking for an affordable host, I reccommend http://www.hostnuke.com/ their prices are quite affordable (as low as $6.99) and they have a great uptime (I should know, I work the helpdesk)...

www.pair.com , www.verio.net , www.interland.com , etc all have asp.net accounts that support cgi/perl applications as well.
http://www.interland.com/shared/bluehalo/?package=b200&page=b200&path=snavb200

A few interesting things regarding this error:

1. I found a few hits on Google regarding this error and they are all recent issues that have been brought up in the last month with UBB.

2. I just started seeing the problem myself on one of my UBB forums today. Nothing has changed in the forum control panel that I know of. The only thing that DID change on the IIS server that's hosting the forums is that I applied 2 Microsoft security hotfixes via SUS yesterday. No changes at all were made to the SMTP server and to my knowledge the SMTP server is functioning just fine still.

3. This problem only seems to happen on one of the UBB forums I host. It is not happening on another set of UBB forums that I host (same UBB version 6.5.0) on the same IIS 5 server, but different virtual website.

Jas

The problem seems to have gone away after a server reboot. The only thing I can think of is that there was some sort of file lock on one of the required script files responsible for sending SMTP email. I ran full backups last night and this morning, however, I run full backups every week, so who knows.

There is nothing that could cause the UBB not to be able to connect to the SMTP server unless there's something outside of the scripts that causes the failure. The methods used by UBB are the industry standards, and can not "just break." There has not been an SMTP issue with UBB.classic that has NOT been related to the server or Perl installation since the new mail routines in 6.1.

If a server reboot fixed the issue, and the server itself also functions as an SMTP server, then chances are that the SMTP service itself was broken or otherwise offline.

Thank you for the reply Charles.

Oddly enough, the problem has resurfaced again this morning.

Last night's sequence of events was:
1. Reboot the SMTP server. No effect. UBB SMTP email still broken and we get the error message.

2. Reboot the web server. Ahh.. SMTP error message has gone away and things are working again.

3. This morning, things are still working, then all of the sudden we're back to the error message again.

This problem is not happening on the other UBB forums I host on the same web server ie., the problem is specific to this particular set of UBB forums. So I just don't think it's a global web server problem.

I'm not sure what else to do other than to re-install the forums and "move" a backed up copy of all the registered users, forums, and topics back to the new installation using the supported move methods.

I'll check the perl installation but that wouldn't explain why the other forums I host work fine using the same perl installation.

Charles, correct me if I'm wrong, but you are also pointing the finger at the SMTP server too. Since both of my forums (1 works, 1 is broke) use the same SMTP server, that kind of blows that theory. Access and denial of relaying on the SMTP server is graned on a per IP address basis and right now my SMTP server only allows relaying from one internal IP address, and that's the web server that hosts both sets of UBB forums.

Problems like this are intriguing to me. It's satisfying to come up with a root cause, unfortunately, I don't know if I'll ever come up with a root cause on this issue. It may very well bug me in the back of my mind for a long tiem

If both UBBs are using the same version of the code, are on the same machine, and both are pointing at the same EXACT SMTP server, then there is no reason that I can ever think of as to why things would break in that way.

Congrats, you stumped me.

Ok, PM email is fixed this time permanently.

I installed a brand new fresh set of forums from the UBB .zip file. SMTP error still happened.

So then I got the packet sniffer out and found the when the SMTP mail message was being generated, the web server wasn't even talking to the mail server at all. Not 1 single packet was going from the web server to the SMTP server.

I also ran the packet sniffer when generating an SMTP mail message from the other set of UBB forums that have been working fine. A whole series of frames could be viewed in the sniffer showing the SMTP message being successfully sent.

I found the root cause of the issue. It was a rogue DNS server in my test lab that was performing recursive DNS name lookups for the production web server and providing the improper IP address DNS host name resolution for the SMTP server which is not what I wanted it to be doing. So when the faulty UBB forum was trying to initiate SMTP mail, it was trying to talk to a router which of course is not running an SMTP service. The resulting error message in UBB was:
"Unable to connect to the SMTP server. The following error was returned: Unknown error The server either does not exist, or rejected the connection. Please ensure that the UBB is allowed to relay mail through the server."

What threw me off was the "or rejected the connection" part of the error message. I was focusing solely on a relay restriction issue on the mail server or a corrupt file somewhere in the UBB forum files.

The egg is on my face on this one. :rolleyes:

They were pointing to a DIFFERENT FQDN names (which I knew) and one of the names resolves properly, and the other name does not

What you said is true... all things being equal, including the SMTP server names, it should have worked for both forums.

BTW, I like the rockband graemlins