Email not reaching my in house server.

EdFred

EdFred

Taxi to Parking
Joined
Feb 25, 2005
Messages
30,242
Location
Michigan
Display Name
Display name:
White Chocolate
I have an Exchange Server running on SBS2003. I have one customer that calls saying they sent us an (or multiple) email(s). And we go through the Q & A usual routine. (we have a hyphen in our domain name). They say the get no bounceback on a wrong recipient name, I don't see anything in the badmail folder, I don't see any rejection in the queue. I've checked my blocked recipient list, and they aren't on it. I'm not using any blacklisting providers, etc...

Anyone have an idea why one single customer would send an email with a correct (according to them) recipient and domain name that simply vanishes into the internet ether every time?
 
Someone hacked their DNS server and is redirecting them?
 
I have no idea. It's the purchasing girl that calls us, and is told by their IT dept they fixed the problem - except it's never been fixed. But their IT department (no clue if it's a real IT dept or like me just some guy) never bothers to call us. They can send to other people just fine, but for some reason nothing ever touches our server.

We can email them no problem.
 
Is your mx record directly to your exchange smtp or do you have hosted mx backup?
 
ChrisK said:
Is your mx record directly to your exchange smtp or do you have hosted mx backup?
Click to expand...

All that points to our ip and domain. I had to get that changed around because I had outbound mail getting rejected because it was showing the IP address as belonging to the service provider, and the lazy spam filters were like domain != domain, reject reject reject.
 
You start by having them send you their exact bounce message and you put that in here. From there we may need their mail server log.
 
jesse said:
You start by having them send you their exact bounce message and you put that in here. From there we may need their mail server log.
Click to expand...

They don't get a bounce message, that's the odd thing.
 
Is it one user @ that domain, or all users @ that domain, who cannot send you email?

Rich
 
I'm told it's all, but they are less than helpful with letting me know what they are actually doing on their end.
 
jesse said:
You start by having them send you their exact bounce message and you put that in here.
Click to expand...

A lot of folks either don't generate bounce messages or filter them out. There have been too many email DOS attacks caused by spammers bouncing them off of bad addresses. I don't recall whether SBS generates them or does not generate them by default.

From there we may need their mail server log.
Click to expand...

That's likely to be the only way to resolve this.

Or have them - and only them - send it to a gmail address that forwards to Ed.
 
SBS does (and I do) generate the bounce messages.
 
send them an email and see if they can reply ... would eliminate the "dash? you didn't say there was a dash in there" ... or I typed it just like you said "eddashfred@eddashfred.com"
 
I have done that. They received mine. They replied, no bueno. It's the weirdest thing.
 
Without an NDR, there's not much they can do except check the logs. Although before I did that I'd probably run a tracert from their server to yours, just to make sure it's not a bad cached IP or some other such non mail-specific connection issue.

Rich
 
Could be there domain setup and not yours. If they are sending from an IP that doesn't have an MX record on their domain your server may be rejecting with no bounce. That should show up in your logs though.
 
You need their logs. Tracking down email issues is what I used to do for a living all day long for years.

Any chance you used to use the same DNS provider they're using and you left your domain setup with now invalid records? It's an incredibly common issue that leads to emails never arriving.
 
EdFred - you're probably spending more time and effort hosting your own mail server than necessary considering all the hosted Exchange offerings out there.
 
Time and effort is minimal. I've only had 2 mail issues this entire year. This one, and another where I had to get myself off a blacklist because I got spammed and my server sent out a couple hundred bounce back messages.

Plus, I don't like "my' stuff on the servers of someone else.
 
I think this person has an e-mail address (name?) that has WAY too many letters. We had that issue here a while ago with a poster. Your server probably thinks it is a joke and just deletes it. :D

Gary
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top