Port 25 connection refused

Make sure you have "how to send email" set to "SMTP SERVER secure -- TLS"

Thanks, Jeff - I have that option already selected.

Regards,

Greg

I believe all notices from the cms use sendMessage which uses the method you've set in email settings.

Have you looked into the possibility of server control panel alerts from cpanel/plesk/etc?

Hi Greg,

Do the refused connections in /var/log/mail.log record originating IP address, and if so, can you verify that your CMSB site's outgoing IP matches the ones in the log? It's not uncommon for bots to blindly send out SMTP requests to servers in the hopes that they don't have the port secured, so it's worth checking first if your site is the originator of the refused connections.

Thanks,
Daniel

Hi Daniel,

Yes, the IP address is the local IP address of my EC2 instance. So does this imply it's probably not a bot?

Regards,

Greg

Hi Greg,

Yes, the IP address is the local IP address of my EC2 instance. So does this imply it's probably not a bot?

Yeah, that does make it seem less likely. The next two primary possibilities are: 1) The site configuration is not working correctly and CMSB is attempting to send out on port 25, 2) there's something elsewhere attempting to send contrary to the CMSB settings, such as a custom script, or hosting panel alerts as Steve99 mentioned.

Are you able to receive any email from your site? E.g. you mentioned that it's set up to notify you about error messages - do you receive these? You can also set the Outgoing Mail setting to "Send & Log" and check the Outgoing Mail log to see if there are any emails going out that you were unaware of. If CMSB is able to successfully send mail, then that generally rules out #1.

If it looks like #2, you'll have to decide whether further troubleshooting is worth the hassle, as it's a bit of an open-ended question. Unknown local SMTP connections could be anything from "hijacked script trying to send spam" to "server notification service", though I'd lean towards the latter. Since it's being blocked, there's not much ongoing harm either way. It may be worth researching how to parse your email log to see if you can glean any more details, such as to/from address, though if the connection is being rejected outright it may not record anything like that.

Let me know if you're able to make any progress, or have any more questions! This may be getting outside the realm of CMSB support, but I will still try to assist as I'm able.

Thanks,

Hi Daniel,

I found out I had a few errors in my code and it seems that the server was trying to send out notifications to me about these but for some reason just got stuck in a loop.

After resolving the coding issues and then clearing the mail log queue with the command below all is now running smoothly.

sudo postsuper -d ALL

I also decided to empty my mail.log file as this was very large (1GB+):

cat /dev/null > /var/log/mail.log

Thanks as always for the great support!

Regards,

Greg