PIX and email attachements

[smckenna]

Hello to all,

I had a customer question me re a recent installation of a pix 506E ver 6.3.4) that they are having trouble sending and recieving email attachments. I wanted to make sure that the pix doesn't have the ability to strip attachments? They are sending recieving mail just fine on their exchange server it's just that the attachments are not coming through. So I thought I'd come to this forum to get any insight re this and if anyone else has encountered this? thanks.

[mehrdad]

Hi,

The PIX has mailguard to prevent attack to mail server and it works on SMTP protocol for all of requests from outside to mail server at protected network.

specific configurations of Microsoft Exchange Server require the use of commands not allowed by mailguard so you can disable mailgaurd by :

no fixup protocol smtp 25

http://www.ciscopress.com/articles/article.asp?p=24685&seqNum=4

Regards,

Mehrdad

[smckenna]

Thanks Mehrdad, the mail guard I'm familiar with but what I want to know is wether the mail guard can affect email attachments? I've seen it where if exchange doesn't like the mail guard settings it won't send or recieve mail but I've never seen where just the attachments are effected by the pix. My customer is questioning this and so I'm looking for anyone else that may have encourntered this or if I can look elsewhere for the problem of attachments not coming through since this only started happening since th PIX was installed last week. Mail works fine for sending and recieving without attachments.

[mehrdad]

I just found the below link for your issue (PIX and MS Exchange server):

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;320027

[jmia]

I would agree with Mehrdad, I had a customer who recently implemented a MS Exchange 2003 server behind a PIX 506E 6.3(4) with mail guard enabled and they were experiencing the same problem, in that, they could not send attachments via e-mail but e-mails without attachments were being sent/received fine.

After disabeling the mail guard on the pix the customer could send/receive e-mails with attchements.

Now, I personally would keep the mail guard enabled BUT MS ESMTP Servers don't like it !!! Now who's fault is that!

Hope this helps.

Jay

[smckenna]

OK, thanks Mehrdad and Jay. I will try this and see if it ends up being the fix.

Yeah, it's puzzling re the issue here with it being just the attachments. I am hating the idea of turning off mailguard as well...

thanks again.

sm

[blyap20]

I have a Pix 525 unit with the mailguard enabled and running without any problem with the attachement.. I think the best you can do is to simulate the environment that bypass the pix firewall.. for example to use outlook express client to send a email with attachment to the exchange server directly in the internal zone.

By the way I'm using Pix Firewall version 6.2(4)