I moved Method Software to a new server. Licenses always could be generated automatically and sent by email.
It was seven years ago that I did set up the original host. Things have changed. So nothing worked. Thanks to all that spam it is a bit trickier to set up a mail server in the internet in 2006 than it was 1999.
First thing to get right is to have reverse DNS set up right. Otherwise you get something like:
SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection:
host actual.name.removed.com [1.2.3.4]: 5actual.name.removed.com You Must have reverse DNS setup in order to relay mail.
In other words: The ip address you are sending from must resolve to something. With
whois ip-address
you should get a domain. This is something that your hosting provider can set up for you. They have the authority over the IP range that they gave you one from. Took only an hour with my hosting provider. Another sign that they are decent.
Even after this fix the return-path was set to something stupid like ‘www-data@hostname-I-gave-the-machine’
I took a bit of googling and a couple of pointless detours to /etc/hosts and dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config before I found this blog entry that pointed to /etc/email-addresses which indeed did the trick.