A family member wasn't receiving email for a Steam account she created to play a PC game. Her email comes through a Sendmail email server I manage and I found that a Domain Name System-based Blackhole List (DNSBL), the Spam and Open Relay Blocking System (SORBS), had blocked email from the IP address that Valve had for the email server used to send email to her about the account. When I checked the sendmail log file, I found the following two entries:
Dec 29 21:10:26 moonpoint sendmail[27413]: ruleset=check_relay, arg1=smtp03.stea mpowered.com, arg2=127.0.0.6, relay=smtp03.steampowered.com [208.64.202.39], rej ect=550 5.7.1 Spam Block:mail from 208.64.202.39 refused - see http://dnsbl.sorb s.net/ Dec 29 21:17:35 moonpoint sendmail[27661]: ruleset=check_relay, arg1=smtp01.stea mpowered.com, arg2=127.0.0.6, relay=smtp01.steampowered.com [208.64.202.37], rej ect=550 5.7.1 Spam Block:mail from 208.64.202.37 refused - see http://dnsbl.sorb s.net/
Checking, I found the following IP addresses and fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) for Steam email servers:
| IP Address | FQDN |
|---|---|
| 208.64.202.36 | smtp.steampowered.com |
| 208.64.202.37 | smtp01.steampowered.com |
| 208.64.202.38 | smtp02.steampowered.com |
| 208.64.202.39 | smtp03.steampowered.com |
| 208.64.202.40 | steammail.steampowered.com |
To ensure that none of the DNSBLs I use with Sendmail will ever block
email from the Steam email servers, I added the following lines to
/etc/mail/access:
Connect:208.64.202.36 OK Connect:208.64.202.37 OK Connect:208.64.202.38 OK Connect:208.64.202.39 OK Connect:208.64.202.40 OK
I then used the makemap hash command to rebuild the access
database.
# makemap hash /etc/mail/access </etc/mail/access #
Once I did that, she was able to receive the Steam-related email.
