Relay access denied on sending mail, Other domain outside of network

man19688 picture man19688 · Jun 27, 2013 · Viewed 141.4k times · Source

Sending mail results in error "Relay access denied".

It throws "Relay access denied", whenever I tried to send mail to "other_domain" from "outside_network". It works just fine for "myown_domain" from "outside/inside_network" and to "other_domain" from "inside_network".

Here is the list of telnet commands.

mail from:[email protected]
- 250 2.1.0 Ok
rcpt to:[email protected]
- 250 2.1.5 Ok
rcpt to:[email protected]
- 554 5.7.1 <[email protected]>: Relay access denied.
rcpt to:[email protected]
- 554 5.7.1 <[email protected]>: Relay access denied.
rcpt to:[email protected]
- 554 5.7.1 <[email protected]>: Relay access denied.

I followed all the steps described in "Microsoft Support" and make sure that server configured in correct way and it do not reject any mail. I also tried to trace through using couple of blogs like this one.

While using MxToolbox also got the same result "Relay access denied".

As "Relay access denied" is very common issue.. there are lot of blogs/documentation are there.. I tried to read all, but I think I am looking in wrong place.

Does anybody have any suggestion?

Answer

Jeffery Land picture Jeffery Land · Jun 27, 2013

If it is giving you relay access denied when you are trying to send an email from outside your network to a domain that your server is not authoritative for then it means your receive connector does not grant you the permissions for sending/relaying. Most likely what you need to do is to authenticate to the server to be granted the permissions for relaying but that does depend upon the configuration of your receive connector. In Exchange 2007/2010/2013 you would need to enable ExchangeUsers permission group as well as an authentication mechanism such as Basic authentication.

Once you're sure your receive connector is configured make sure your email client is configured for authentication as well for the SMTP server. It depends upon your server setup but normally for Exchange you would configure the username by itself, no need for the domain to appended or prefixed to it.

To test things out with authentication via telnet you can go over my post here for directions: https://jefferyland.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/essential-exchange-troubleshooting-send-email-via-telnet/