email - DNSBL listed at zen.spamhaus.org - cant get outgoing mail working? Am I interpreting the response correctly?

I have problem with a mailserver and there is something I kind of not understand!

I can connect, authenticate, specify the sender address - but when specifying the reciever i get a error 550 which looks like so:

RCPT TO:joehopf@gmail.com

550-DNSBL listed at zen.spamhaus.org
550 http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=62.178.15.161

Now the strange thing is that 62.178.15.161 is my local client address. Not the servers ip address.

Also the error code 550 seems to be defined as so:

550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable

To me that makes totally no sense. Why this error code with this spamhaus message? Why the local ip adress and not the servers?

There is exim running and there is nothing turning up in the logs mail.err mail.info mail.log mail.warn in /var/log

I looked up both the servers and the clients ip adress on blacklists. The clients ip adress is listed on some (as expected), but the server is totally clean.

Here is the complete telnet log when I reproduced the error. Mail clients like Evolution and Thunderbird give me the same spamhaus error message.

joe@joe-desktop:~$ telnet mail.hunsynth.org 25

Trying 193.164.132.42...
Connected to mail.hunsynth.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 hunsynth.org ESMTP Exim 4.69 Sat, 01 Jan 2011 17:52:45 +0100
HELP
214-Commands supported:
214 AUTH STARTTLS HELO EHLO MAIL RCPT DATA NOOP QUIT RSET HELP
EHLO AUTH
250-hunsynth.org Hello chello062178015161.6.11.univie.teleweb.at [62.178.15.161]
250-SIZE 52428800

250-PIPELINING
250-AUTH PLAIN LOGIN CRAM-MD5
250-STARTTLS
250 HELP
AUTH LOGIN
334 VXNlcm5hbWU6
dGVzdEBodW5zeW50aC5vcmc=
334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6
*****
235 Authentication succeeded

MAIL FROM:test@hunsynth.org
250 OK
RCPT TO:joehopf@gmail.com
550-DNSBL listed at zen.spamhaus.org
550 http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=62.178.15.161
quit
221 hunsynth.org closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.
joe@joe-desktop:~$ 

Update:

I tried the same thing from my other server and could successfully send an email.

So it really looks like the server does check the IP wich establiches the connection is in some blacklist.

This is theoretically a good thing - but - the authentication on the server should prevent that? Or shouldn't it?

Well I just think it would be absurd if I couldn't send email over my smtp server from my dynamic ISP connection because the dynamic is listed, altough i have a clean server with login?

Answer

Okay, it think I kind of figured it out.

i had to add the rule:

accept
         authenticated = *

to to the top of /etc/exim4/vexim-acl-check-rcpt.conf