[SOLVED] Howto Change Postfix HELO?

[dan23945]

I need to change my smtp HELO so that it matches my MX record. I tried changing it in my "main.cf" postifx file, but when I restarted the zimbra services it overwrote it to my servers hostname again. I did find this bug post, but I couldn't follow where to change zimbraMtaMyHostname. Any help would be appreciated!! Thanks!

[uxbod]

Welcome to the forums

Search is your friend [SOLVED] Problem With zmlocalconfig -e and Postfix smtpd_banner Variable

[dan23945]

Thanks, uxbod, for the link but the commands listed in the link above didn't work for me. When I telnet to my server it still shows up as
"220 zimbraserver.domain.local ESMTP Postfix"

[dan23945]

One other thing, and I could easily be getting this wrong (I haven't been operating MTAs for decades so...), but I don't think the banner is the same thing the MTA sends when acting as an SMTP client. When it (the local, sending MTA) is sending a message to a remote mail server, it receives the remote MTAs banner when it connects, and the local MTA then has to say HELO (or EHLO) and it's FQDN

so

EHLO mail.realdomainthatwouldhavebeenvalid[DOT]com

which I don't think is the same thing as the banner.

And I believe the FQDN that I provide is what the remote server checks to see if it really is a FQDN (fully qualified domain name) and that the FQDN exists (ie: is resolvable). .loc and .local TLD (top level domains) aren't likely to ever be globally resolvable.

[LMStone]

Hi Dan,

You are not obligated to use the "$mydomain" variable in the banner string; you can replace it with something literal, like:

zmlocalconfig -e postfix_smtpd_banner="mail.mydomain.com NO UCE ESMTP"
postconf -e smtpd_banner="mail.mydomain.com NO UCE ESMTP"
zmmtactl reload

And just to confirm, the Postfix variable smtpd_banner is indeed what Postfix uses to HELO other mail clients.

Hope that helps,
Mark

[dan23945]

I ran the commands posted above. It did indeed change my smtpd_banner.

"telnet mail.REDACTED.net 25"

220 mail.REDACTED.net ESMTP Postfix
ehlo smtp1
250-zimbraserver.REDACTED.local

As you can see, changing the smtpd_banner did not change what the mail server says HELO/EHLO as.

Here is what yahoo records show in their received header from the MTA after the proposed change was made and the daemons restarted

Received: from zimbraserver.REDACTED.local (rrcs-XX-XXX-73-145.central.biz.rr.com [XX.XXX.73.145])
by flpi119.prodigy.net (8.13.8 inb regex/8.13.8) with ESMTP id m451if19028913
for ; Sun, 4 May 2008 18:44:46 -0700

As you can see, it records the HELO (which is not what is in the banner) and the reverse DNS. Again, I'm pretty sure that when the MTA is acting as an SMTP client, the banner has nothing to do with the HELO/EHLO of the server. The header recorded by Yahoo seems to agree with that.

From Chapter 3, Pg. 19 of "The Book Of Postfix" by Ralf Hildebrandt and Patrick Koetter
(This is nested inside the "Setting the Hostname in the smtpd Banner" section)

"CAUTION - When Postfix transports messages to other mail servers, it acts as a mail client. While introducing itself to the mail server, it uses the MYHOSTNAME paramater as the HELO name by default. Some mail servers are configured to reject mail if the HELO name and the reverse-resolvable FQDN of the server do not match. Either make sure that the hostname you set for Postfix matches the hostname of your server's IP, or set SMTP_helo_name to match your official FQDN in the DNS namespace."

[cyberdex]

I had the same problem. My host was zimbra.corp.city.mydomain.com and I wanted the helo to say it was mail.mydomain.com

I eventually found this :

Bug 17794 - add global config values for postfix myhostname and myorigin to ldap

Which lead me to eventually do this :

zmprov mcf zimbraMtaMyHostname mail.mydomain.com
zmcontrol stop && zmcontrol start

And the helo used when talking to outside mailservers is now using mail.mydomain.com

[dan23945]

Thanks cyberdex! That was exactly what I was looking for, I really appreciate it!!