Weird BES SMTP problems
April 6th, 2008 @ 4:31 pm
The alert emails as well as emailing activation passwords to users has never quite worked right on our BES server. I’d see something like this in the event log every time BES tried to send an email: DoSMTPCommand: Command was: MAIL FROM: <BESAdmin> followed by DoSMTPCommand: Response was: 501 5.1.7 Invalid address. Notice the from address? There’s no domain listed. Weird. I know I entered the correct fully qualified address.
I’ve Googled, searched the docs, read forums, and everything in between and never could find the issue. I don’t have a need to email passwords to users and the alerts weren’t real important, so fixing it has been on the back burner. Fast forward to today - I came across a forum post suggesting to add a new DWORD value - MxDisabled=1 in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\BESAlert.
I tried it and low and behold it fixed the SMTP issues. I can’t imagine what disabling MX lookups would have to do with the FROM address being improperly formatted. I wonder if it’s a bug in BES? Anyone else seen this issue?
Had this same problem. For some reason exchange 2007 didn’t like just as the user name. The errors went away when I changed the smtpaccountname key to besadmin@domain.com instead of just besadmin.
Josh
Comment by Josh — April 10, 2008 @ 6:48 pm
Your system must strip out angle brackets. The second sentence should be “For some reason exchange 2007 didn’t like just <besadmin> as the user name
Comment by Josh — April 10, 2008 @ 6:52 pm
I’m pretty sure I tried besadmin@domain.com and that didn’t work either. I may have to go back and look at it again.
Not sure what’s up with the angle brackets. I’m guessing it strips them to keep people from embedding HTML.
Comment by Derek — April 10, 2008 @ 7:00 pm
Thanks! Fixed my issue, I thought I’d be chasing this one forever.
Dale
Comment by Dale — August 6, 2008 @ 8:10 am