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Relay access denied

·151 words·1 min·
Mail Security

If you’re checking through your mail logs, or you catch a bounced e-mail with “554 relay access denied” in the bounce, the issue can be related to a few different things:

If your server bounces with this message when people send e-mail to you:

  • Check to make sure that your mail server is configured to receive mail for your domain
    • Postfix: /etc/postfix/mydomains (on some systems)
    • Sendmail: /etc/mail/local-host-names
    • Qmail: /var/qmail/control/rcpthosts
  • Verify that your MX records are pointing to your server, and not someone else’s (very important during server migrations)
  • If you recently made changes in Postfix, make sure to run postmap on your domains file and run postfix reload

If you get this message when you try to send e-mail to other people through your server:

  • Enable SMTP authentication in your e-mail client
  • If SMTP authentication is on in your client, check your server’s authentication daemons to be sure they’re operating properly