Plesk: How to Change Qmail IP Address

Re: Change plesk qmail IP address

If you’ve got a Plesk server and some unsavoury character has hosted and spammed from your server, even if you remove them you may find your IP is blocked by many of the blacklists – even though this will only be temporary for 24 or 48 hours, this is still an issue for your remaining clients.

What you need to do it temporarily change the qmail sender IP address, this is very easy to do and as I say, it’s temporary, a server reboot gets everything back to normal.

Let’s say your qmail IP address is 1.1.1.1 and you want to change it to 2.2.2.2. Your gateway is 3.3.3.3 and does not change.

SSH in to your server console and let’s look at your setup:

# /sbin/ip route

1.2.3.4/1 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 1.1.1.1
 1.2.3.4/16 dev eth0 scope link
 default via 3.3.3.3 dev eth0

To change the default qmail IP from 1.1.1.1 to 2.2.2.2:

# /sbin/ip route change default via 3.3.3.3 dev eth0 src 2.2.2.2

That’s all there is to it. All qmail outgoing mails now leave from IP 2.2.2.2 instead of 1.1.1.1

Send an email, look at the header, you will see the email came from the new IP address. If you screw up, at worst, simply reboot the server to get the IP settings as before. This works fine on all versions of Plesk that we have used.