| Tom Kelleher 2004-04-29, 9:34 pm |
| Folks,
I have moved my domain to an ISP that provides a POP server but not an
SMTP server. This didn't strike me as a problem, because I have Win XP
Pro and the IIS SMTP server has served me well for minor usages before.
So I set it up in Outlook 2003 as my SMTP server.
Now, however, I am getting about 5-10% of my emails rejected. They
show up in my inbox with just this as the message body:
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
Delivery to the following recipients failed.
[my recipient's email address]
....and there are always two attachments -- my original outgoing
email, and a text file called details.txt that contains only this
content:
Reporting-MTA: dns;[my SMTP box name]
Received-From-MTA: dns;[my SMTP box name]
Arrival-Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 10:51:44 -0400
Final-Recipient: rfc822;[recipient's email]
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
EVERY bounced email contains just those details. Nothing identifying
the mail server that bounced it, nothing that tells me why, nothing
that gives me a clue as to how to fix it.
First question: Why would every mail server in the world that
bounces my messages have precisely the same feedback for me? Are
the contents of details.txt created by the bouncing server, or is
something else being helpful and "summarizing" them for me (thus
removing all the useful detail)?
I imagine that some recipient servers (like AOL) don't like receiving
email from a source that they can't find a proper domain name for.
That is, my emails say they're from kelleher[-at]-tkelleher.net, but
when the receiving servers look at the IP and do a reverse-DNS on
it they would get my Sprint DSL domain (some big ugly long string).
That might be what's going on. But I don't know.
Second question: Am I on the right track, and if so, am I out of
luck? I would love to use my local SMTP server for all my outgoing
mail...but if some kind of DNS resolution thing is going to hang
me up 5-10% of the time, then I can't. My domain is hosted at a
company that I love...but they don't provide SMTP. I don't want
to move the domain again.
Suggestions?
Thanks everyone, in advance.
- Tom
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