FreePBX mail queue warnings

If you go through the obvious steps for setting up a FreePBX server and just leave it for a day or so, you may well come back to the dashboard to find the System Overview section telling you that there's a Mail Queue, and that "NNN messages are queued on this machine, and have not been delivered" (in my case, after 24 hours, the number was 152).

If you log into the machine by SSH and ask for the mail queue, you will find all these emails are addressed to none@yourpbx.com, so it's not really surprising they haven't been delivered (at the time of writing that domain is registered to NameBright.com / DropCatch.com and is available to buy for US$3995 (monthly terms available) and has no MX record).

Where did that come from? I certainly didn't tell it that was my admin email address.

More to the point, how do I change it so that if it thinks it has something to send me, I might actually receive it?

  • System - Administrators - no, nothing useful there
  • System - Asterisk Manager Users - no, nor there
  • System - System Admin - that module isn't even installed by default…
  • Admin - User Management - there aren't any users listed yet
  • System - Advanced Settings - I can't see none@yourpbx.com anywhere in that

Okay, time to get creative - let's search on the machine to see where that address is - maybe in a config file or a database somewhere? 

# grep -rl "none@yourpbx.com" /etc
/etc/fail2ban/jail.local

Aha!

Nice to know - now, how do I configure fail2ban from the FreePBX GUI?

Answer - no idea.

A Google search for "FreePBX none@yourpbx.com" shows up loads of people having exactly the same problem, firstly trying to work out where these emails are coming from, and then trying to work out how to configure fail2ban from FreePBX.

I haven't yet found an answer, from the FreePBX team or anyone else, saying how to change this. so I just edited /etc/fail2ban/jail.local by hand and left it at that.

It's not entirely encouraging to see at the top of the file: 

# Fail2Ban configuration file
#
# This file is Generated from your sysadmin module on your PBX
# DO NOT HAND EDIT THIS FILE

and then to find out that you don't even have a sysadmin module on your PBX, so there's no way of doing this "properly", but there you go.

Comment: Given that FreePBX is supposed to be a nice convenient way of installing and running an Asterisk server from a GUI front-end, though, this must be a bit irritating for people who aren't comfy with SSH and command-line editors.

Ho hum.

PS: Of course, there's no noticeable way of using the FreePBX GUI to examine or flush the mail queue, either, so you just have to wait for the delivery retry attempts to repeatedly fail, until the system just gives up and deletes them on its own.

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