After a lot more testing I found this problem was only happening on sites where the mail.?.com and www.?.com were hosted on different IP's. One of the sites I tested on had just the right mix to make it clear to me because they had one IP for each (as opposed to the many Earthlink had). Sometimes our SMTP server would connect to mail.?.com in which case everything worked,
and sometimes it connected to www.?.com in which case it would fail but still respond with an SMTP mail response as you saw.
I looked back at the IMail config and found specifically for the SMTP server there were hard coded DNS server addresses entered that reflected our previous network DNS server addresses which was replaced 1.5 months ago.
Now that I think about it I am not sure why it was working at all?
We did not have any problems during the 1st month of operation on the new network.
This only flared up recently.
When I manually updated those DNS address entries things seemed to be working perfectly.
I couldn't get a repeat of the problem.
Thanks for the help!
Best Regards, Chester
At 04:36 PM 9/9/2003 -0500, you wrote:
I get the differentiation here that you are referring to.
ok
But any of the solutions mentioned (as I understand) them do require extra effort to mitigate these problems.
yes, it was easy getting DSL subscriber access, but it's going to be harder and harder to deliver mail from those nets.
One of the reasons we became IMail customers was because of the ease of setting up and using the product.
that aspect is completely unchanged.
I talked to Covad and they won't setup our IP for reverse DNS.
ok
Our domain name does have an A record and MX record associated with our IP
ok, and you have PTR, so you're not that bad off.
and works on the whois.
irrelevant, mailservers don't query whois for anything
But this doesn't help with Reverse DNS.
no
I did try pointing our IMail SMTP gateway option to point to the Covad SMTP server, but this failed.
yes, the abuse coming from subscriber networks is so horrendous, and apparently so hard/expensive for the network operators to police, they don't even trust their own subscribers' IPs for unauthenticated relaying.
Covad is going to turn on Authentication starting Oct 7th, so even if this worked, it would probably be short term.
Ask Ipswitch if Imail SMTP can be improved to support SMTP AUTH for the "send all mail through gateway" relaying.
For our inter office solution we will just use the Covad SMTP server from our email clients.
However this leaves our Web Messaging partially working which our remote people are using.
As a side note I noticed that as an Earthlink customer at home stopped letting me access our business SMTP server remotely.
They must be blocking remote port 25 access now?
that's one way to stop abuse from Earthlink nets, but it forces most clients through earthlink SMTP gateways, where Earthlink must have instituted a lot of mail log surfing bots to watch for abuse.
Len
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