Still having intermittent mail problems

[jammin]

I am still getting some mail non delivered to me... It seems to be only from people using one ISP, but unfortunately it is the biggest one in Australia. I haven't managed to reproduce it when sending from any other mail servers.

The bounce they get is below:

When I do a DNS query on mta01ps.bigpond.com (reportedly the mail handler in question), everything looks correct. As far as I can see it should be attempting delivery to the right server.

Can anyone think of any reason this might be happening?

I have emailed the ISP's postmaster, but I don't expect much from them (ex government owned monopoly)

Thanks
Jammin


-------- Original Message --------
From: - Wed Oct 02 19:46:20 2002
X-UIDL: 1033551859.53446.mail,S=3054
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 10000000
Return-Path: <>
Delivered-To: todd@electronet.com.au
Received: (qmail 53443 invoked from network); 2 Oct 2002 09:44:18 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO mta01ps.bigpond.com) (144.135.25.133) by
dns.hsphere.cc with SMTP; 2 Oct 2002 09:44:18 -0000
To: todd@electronet.com.au
From: Mail Administrator <postmaster@bigpond.com>
Reply-To: Mail Administrator <postmaster@bigpond.com>
Subject: Mail System Error - Returned Mail
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 19:45:08 +1000
Message-Id: <H3CLR805.K3G@mta01ps.bigpond.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/report; report-type=delivery-status;
Boundary="===========================_ _= 7850341(23354+1076644324)"



This Message was undeliverable due to the following reason:

Each of the following recipients was rejected by a remote mail server. The reasons given by the server are included to help you determine why each recipient was rejected.

Recipient:
Reason: 5.7.1 Unable to relay for ben@lateralsystems.com.au

Please reply to
if you feel this message to be in error.

[mresell]

jammin,

Could you specifically state what you are doing and what settings you have?
I am assuming you are using them as your connection to the internet or the customer in question is? If you are using your pop and smtp settings for your acct and you get this error while tryin to send you could check your authentication settings. Very often especially now because worthless SPAM and lame hackers are the plague of the universe ISP's are changing their server configs accordingly. The problem is you can't get someone w/ technical expertise who is privy to network details like this.

Bottom line is that many times the outgoing mail server especially has to be theirs. Also many want pop and smtp to be the same. It is obviously win win for them since most are selling hosting now as well. Really kind of sucks. If I am totally not understanding your ? I apologize.

[mresell]

jammin...

Wanted to add that getting that message can also happen when you cannot access mail server this is not ISP related tho. So if you are using same settings and diff ISP, but get 2 diff results then it is probably not the mail server.

[jammin]

Sorry I should have been more specific:

1. Several of my customers and associates are using "bigpond" a large australian ISP, and of course using their smtp mail server as well.

2. When they try to send mail to ben@lateralsystems.com.au (me), it bounces back to them, giving the error above.

3. I can successfully send a message to ben@lateralsystems.com.au using several other smtp servers (including my isp, hotmail & mail.hsphere.cc). Of course I can't try and send one using bigpond because they are not my ISP.

It seems to be affecting lateralsystems.com.au at the moment, but I have previously had bigpond users complain of bounces to some of my other domains as well, always with the same message.

Hope this is clearer, and thanks for taking the time to read my post.

Jammin

[mresell]

jammin,

Your on a windows server aren't you? I haven't even started on the windows side yet...not for hosting.

I have 2 ideas.

1) is that your alias mail.lateralsystems.com is different than lateralsystems.com.au thus appearing to some servers as a relay. You may need to change your recipient policies as well.(I am not even sure if you have access to this)

2. Server configuration issue. There appears to be an issue related to this on nt12 POP port 110(incoming) It is not responding ok so something looks wrong to me. Don't know if it is related to the dns mess that psoft has created or whether this has been a dns issue internally from the beginning. I would definitely make a TT for this. My DNS was a total mess for about 3 days. All is ok for now.

Psoft kinda messed w/ everybody lately w/ their ips and dns issues created from these "Upgrades"

[jammin]

Hi mrresell,

Thanks for the reply ...

Windows has nothing to do with it - all mail and dns are on the same (unix) boxes, regardless of whether your web sites are on windows or linux.

Therefore nt12, or any other web server should not even have a POP port 110 on it! All POP is done on mail.hsphere.cc.

As a reseller, my service domain mail.lateralsystems.com is aliased (CNAM) to mail.hsphere.cc. Each domain created within my reseller account then (by me or my customers) is listed with mail.lateralsystems.com as the mail handler (MX).

So the bounce appears to indicate that the remote mail server was able to contact a mail server at mail.lateralsystems.com, but for whatever reason, that mail server rejected my address. This could be either:
a) a problem with mail.hsphere.cc
b) the wrong mail server is actually being contacted.

I don't know, whenever I do a DNS lookup everything *looks* OK ...

Thanks
Jammin

[mresell]

I would agree w/ you however, I was unsure whether they were using a windows mail server as well. Today I get this...which is correct. Yesterday, it was pointing to nt12 w/ an err on pop. Since nt12 SHOULD not have a pop port being for domains. I would agree that something was pointing in the wrong direction. I had the same problem on the unix side. I am assuming the domain in question was on nt12. I didn't check this since I did a brief lookup.
however, it was there....honest. Hopefully, your problem may now be resolved.

HTTP - 80 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2002 19:41:00 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6 FrontPage/5.0.2.2623
Last-Modified: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 09:46:36 GMT
ETag: "1e8730-3b5-3d92d77c"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 949
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

POP3 - 110 +OK <79809.1033674060@mail.hsphere.cc>

[jammin]

Hmmm yeah that is odd indeed.... but the POP server has no place in mail delivery from another mail server. When you send mail through your SMTP server, it looks up the domain you are sending to in DNS, and relays it to (hopefully) the correct SMTP server, where it is stored in some kind of mail system.

POP only comes into the picture when you want to retrieve mail from that server using a mail client.

And weird of weird, I got a friend who was previously getting bounce errors to resend this morning, and it worked OK! It doesnt even seem consistent.

Jammin

[mresell]

I did not mean to imply it was a POP specific problem. That was just part of what I was seeing. It was obviously screwed up.

If it wasn't pointin to the right place then it ain't gonna work right... The fact that today it was aliasing correctly would demonstrate it was prob a dns issue. Glad it seems to be ok