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Plesk 10 Greylist Problems

Recently on several Plesk 10 servers we’ve had users complain that they could not receive email from various domains. Upon investigation we found that the domains were all hosted on Microsoft’s Exchange email service. The bounce messages received by the sender were from bigfish.com and the source address in the server mail logs was a host in messaging.microsoft.com.

We found log entries like this:

So the greylist filter in Plesk 10 is blocking server that are on “dsl|pool|broadband|hsd” address ranges. In this case it would be Microsofts cloud anti-spam service that is on “pool” addresses.

From the Plesk control panel there are very few settings for the greylist filter – you can turn the filter on/off and manage white/black list entries. But there are no options to configure the filtering rules. After some digging at the command line I found this:

This plesk utility give a listing of the configuration for the greylist filter and provides options for configuring the greylist:

Here’s a sample of the info output:

Notice that the server admin tried to whitelist the “@bigfish.com” but it did not work because the “black domain patterns list takes precedent.

Now to solve the problem of mail from *.messaging.microsoft.com we can just add another “white domains pattern list” like this:

And now the email from Microsoft hosted domains should be delivered without error.

Here’s a Parallels Knowledgebase Article on this subject:

How to configure Greylisting

And here’s a thread on Serverfault that got me on the right track:

e-mail gets rejected – bigfish.com error