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I have an EC2 instance on a security group that allows ports 80, 443 and 22 (tcp, inbound from 0.0.0.0/0 and ::/0); and every outbound connection (to 0.0.0.0/0 & ::/0, all tcp & udp).

I've recently set up a mail server, so I've added port 25/tcp from 0.0.0.0/0 and ::/0 as well.

Now I can connect to my mail server from any external hosts using the public ip as expected, no issues there.

I can also connect from within the instance using localhost as hostname or 127.0.0.1 as ip.

But I am unable to connect to the instance on port 25 from within the instance using its public ip or hostname. I don't get a connection refused or anything, just a timeout.

I do not have this issue with any of the other open ports in the instance, I can perfectly telnet to port 80, 443 or 22 using the public ip within the instance shell.

I've tried rebooting, stop/start, and even creating a new security group from scratch and switching the instance to it. Still the same result: External connections OK, internal connection using public ip fails only on that port.

iptables looks fine, I see no restrictions or permissions that would affect this port and not the others.

no firewall is enabled on this instance (Debian buster)

mail server is postfix (I do not know if that makes any difference. If it is in fact a postfix config issue I am baffled that I cannot see anything on server logs and it is allowing every other connection source...)

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But I am unable to connect to the instance on port 25 from within the instance using its public ip or hostname. I don't get a connection refused or anything, just a timeout.

Amazon EC2 doesn't allow outbound SMTP traffic from instances (unless you've applied for and received an exception for your account). This means you can't reach your server's SMTP server -- or anyone else's -- by its public IP address.

If you need to connect to the local host, connect to localhost.

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  • Interesting... Oddly postfix does try to connect to itself using the public hostname when relaying email. (I am trying to relay all email addressed to my domain to my gmail account using postfix virtual domain file, that's why I need it). But I guess I can work around it by resolving the public hostname to 127.0.0.1 on /etc/hosts. I'll try that.
    – NotGaeL
    Dec 13, 2020 at 20:35
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    @NotGaeL Some Linux distributions already put the host's name in /etc/hosts with a local address. This does indeed avoid the problem. Dec 13, 2020 at 20:37
  • Turns out I still need to request permission to relay any incoming emails to my personal gmail account, as postfix obviously needs an outgoing connection to gmail's smtp server upon relay. Anyway I'm glad Amazon has this policy, If only all the other providers did the same...
    – NotGaeL
    Dec 13, 2020 at 21:00

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