Email rejected with "R1: HELO should be a FQDN or address literal"

[roarkh]

One of our users is unable to receive email from a specific server, I checked the reject log and this is what I see...

2017-05-23 13:01:48 H=(travsmtp) [72.250.193.42] F=<[email protected]> rejected RCPT <[email protected]>: R1: HELO should be a FQDN or address literal (See RFC 2821 4.1.1.1)

I tried adding the above ip address to /etc/virtual/whitelst_hosts_ip but that did not help.

I'm a bit confused by what is meant by "R1: HELO should be a FQDN or address literal" but it seems to be defined in the section named EDIT#27 in exim.conf. Does this indicate there is a problem with the sender's Mail server configuration? Is there a safe way to whitelist that server without causing other problems on our server?

Thank for any advice anyone can offer.

 

[Richard G]

I'm a bit confused by what is meant by "R1: HELO should be a FQDN or address literal"

If you are an admin you should know what FQDN means. It means Fully Qualified Domain Name. Any email server should respect that rule.
In a few cases, servers which do not are very poorly configured but in all other cases (the most) they are spammers.

I would never whitelist such servers to help a user. It's better to tell your user that the sender should fix his mailserver.
I don't know how you put it in the /etc/virtual/whitelist_hosts_ip but that should do the trick. Did you reload exim afterwards?
But as said, its better the sender fixes their server, especially if it's a company.

 

[RoseHosting]

According to the log record, the problem is 'H=(travsmtp)', which represents the host. It should be a FQDN or address literal, not travsmtp .