Multi-Wan Email internal server quirk - defined

[brcisna]

Hello All,

Posting this ,just to have it documented in hopes it may help someone down the road.
School setting.
pfSense 1,2,3-RELEASE

A couple evenings ago,we had very bad weather blowing over many trees ,electric out for several hours.
When all the server rack stuff came back on,we were working fine thanks to pfSense! One of the ISP's had a tower down still, so pfSense failed over to OPT1/WAN2 as it should.
We use our own internal email server.

Problem: When the main ISP/gateway came back online email was working fine until some of the secretaries started getting bounces from bank sites etc. So,checking the bounces,sure enough it was showing the WAN2 public IP. I did try and do some testing when I initially set the pfSense up to make sure the WAN1 gateway was being used for both the smtp and IMAP port numbers. I looked and looked ,rebooted the pfSense box,etc. Thought I had a rule wrong above/below in lan rules what it should be located.

Long story short ,as soon as I restarted sendmail the correct public IP,started appearing in the email message headers. I could also see some quirky stuff in the mail logs that looked odd. I know ,you say the pfSense firewall rules determines this. But this is how it happened for this scenario. I know in older versions of sendmail if you changed hostnames on the actual machine after doing initial setup,it would kill sendmail until you hand edited a couple of the sendmail files. This seems something similar, kind of.

I know there is surely a more methodical way of troubleshooting this,but when you are scrambling,trying to make several unhappy women happy again,its tuff!..

Thanks,
Barry