If you’re self-hosting Mail-in-a-Box (MIAB) in a Proxmox LXC container like I am, and suddenly your server can’t send emails to any provider (ProtonMail, Gmail, Outlook—all timing out with “Connection timed out” in postfix logs), this post is for you. It took some tcpdump detective work, but we nailed it. Spoiler: it was a sneaky private IP NAT block on outbound port 25.
The Problem: No Outbound Mail, Clean Timeouts
My postfix/smtp logs looked like this:
On October 17th, I was laid off from what was supposed to be a long term contract at IBM after having previously laid off at another job at a certain ailing mortgage company. Job hunting as been really tough and the only thing that has looked really good so far is sales job at Tiger Direct.