Problems receiving emails from hotmail users

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Level 1

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Problems receiving emails from hotmail users

Hi,

I have a mac server running snow leopard for our small business. Everything has been working fine for the last two years but for the last week or so we are suddenly not receiving any emails from our customers with hotmail accounts, although emails sent out to hotmail accounts are being successfully delivered.

We've checked our mail server filters, relays etc and there are no obvious issues. Have also tried lowering the junk email filtering level but to no avail. We use zen.spamhaus.org for our junk mail rejection server.

All other email that we can determine is being safely received. Have checked the mail logs and there's nothing in them that sheds any light on the hotmail issue. I set up a temp hotmail account and emailed our domain and cc'd my personal email account. The emails were received in my personal (mac.com) email but none of them appear to have been delivered to our server. No bounce back or warning messages in the temp hotmail account, so it appears to the sender as though the email has been successfully delivered.

I have now also asked our domain host to check from their end just in case it's a problem with an intermediate server (?) but in the meantime I thought I'd post in case someone has come across this or similar problem in the past.

Hope someone can help.

Kind regards

Posted on Aug 24, 2011 4:23 AM

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Answer 1

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MrHoffman

Community+ 2024

Level 10

116,583 points

Aug 24, 2011 7:57 AM in response to Its a Mirale

Until it has been expressly verified, external DNS errors are the principle suspect for this behavior. It's likely that the MX record, and the forward and reverse DNS translations of the mail server don't match.

Without correct DNS, then some of your inbound messages will be dropped (at the sending mail server), and some of your outbound messages can be dropped (at the receiving mail server), but mail services can generally and usually still work when interoperating with the less-aggressively-configured mail servers.

If you don't want to post your domain, then verify your DNS translations with the "dig" tool or otherwise. dig mail.example.com and dig -x ip.address.of.server and dig MX example.com, where example.com (and mail.example.com, and the IP address ip.address.of.server) are adjusted to match your domain. If you're less shy, post your domain and we can verify it.

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Answer 2

Its a Mirale Author

Level 1

5 points

Aug 25, 2011 7:34 AM in response to MrHoffman

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Unfortunately in the course of trying to investigate further with an engineer it now appears as though the server disk is in a very poor state and we're now having to replace this. I'm hoping that the disk failure is in some way responsible for the issue but all will be clear once replaced.

I'll keep the question open for now until the disk is replaced and I can verify if the original issue has also been resolved by replacing.

I'll post back soon. Thanks again, much appreciated.

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