Postfix can not receive mail with error: amavis[15499]: () (!)DENIED ACCESS from IP x.x.x.x, policy bank

Question

My mail server ran very well. But after my setting an OpenConnect VPN on the mail server, I found the server could not receive mails from outside.

For example, my host IP is 1.2.3.4

I did tail -f /var/log/mail.log and found

amavis[15499]: () (!)DENIED ACCESS from IP 1.2.3.4, policy bank

Usually Postfix (2.11) talks to amavis (the virus scanning software) using local IP 127.0.0.1 but this time it uses 1.2.3.4. Amavis denied its access.

So how to get rid of this error and I still want to use OpenConnect VPN on the same server.

I found another similar question Ubuntu server not using localhost IP for internal communication but he didn't get a correct answer.

Can you help me?

Many thanks!

Answer 1

I seemingly had solved the problem by these two steps.

• add line smtp_bind_address = 127.0.0.1 in file /etc/postfix/main.cf

• release more RAM for amavis. It does need lots of ram to have mail spamming protection for you. Sometimes you would need a reboot. Here's the suggestion: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/hello-i-got-postfix-smtp-9837-connect-to-127-0-0-1-127-0-0-1-10024-connection-refused

It's strongly recommended to have a rich RAM server to run the mail service. My 756MB VPS has a WordPress site, Mailserver, OpenVPN, OpenConnect VPN, Dnscrypt, MySQL, PostgreSQL and etc.. Not doute that it had ran out of RAM. I mounted extra 1.5GB SWAP. My server still work with all these services running anyway.

Hope this could be helpful.