McAfee Antivirus Blocks SMTP Traffic
A while back I was installing and configuring MS Exchange in my SharePoint development farm so I can test email notifications in a Visual Studio workflow. I started scouring DNS and did find that I had forgotten to add the MX record for my Exchange server. That still didn’t fix the problem – but was still necessary. The rest of the day was spent verifying that SMTP was configured properly and no other routing issues were found. I finally started looking over other possibilities on the server and found the culprit – McAfee Antivirus. In the Virus Scan Console you need to go to open the Access Protection properties. In there you’ll see a setting that is titled “Prevent mass mailing worms from sending email”. You can edit that setting and add an exclusion for SMTP which resolved the problem. I am enclosing links to articles that provide a step-by-step walkthrough of the topics I mentioned in this post.
- Configure outgoing e-mail (SharePoint Server 2010): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263462.aspx
- Configuring DNS, MX, and SPF Records and Settings: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff714972.aspx
- Create an SMTP Send Connector: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997285.aspx
- How to add process exclusions in Access Protection Port Blocking rules: https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=KB56502