We've got a shared hosting account for the website and email of a small trail association. About a week ago, people started complaining that their emails to us were being bounced with the message "DNS Error: 1421891 DNS type 'mx' lookup of [xxxx.org] responded with code SERVFAIL". However, the email system was working fine for everyone else. It appears that only #gmail.com addresses are receiving this error, though I can't be entirely sure.
The hosting service insists that their server is running just fine, so the problem can't be on their end. I've been pretty dissatisfied with this host, though, and I don't see any chatter on the internet about Gmail problems. So what should I try next.
One other oddity: when I run the site through http://www.isitdownrightnow.com, it tells me that the site is down, even though it seems to be running just fine.
Can you please make sure that your MX record is resolving to correct IP address? Also, please check the SPF record settings at your end.
Make sure the firewall is not blocking the access for the emails to Gmail.
The problem magically fixed itself one day. My feeling is that my hosting service fixed a problem and won't admit it.
Related
I have an issue where I have a custom domain set up with gmail, I have all DNS pointing to the correct location as defined in the google documentation (4 hours is the smallest TTL my DNS allows me to assign):
I have already set up gmail in google admin, and that all seems correct to me.
The weird thing is that if I send email from the account admin#mycustomdomain.com I can send it and the recipient will receive it.
However if they try to respond, they get an error from Mail Delivery Subsystem saying that it is not delivered, and it never appears in the admin#mycustomdomain.com email address.
Does anyone know what I'm missing? I've made sure that there are no extra MX records that could be messing this up in my DNS as well. I have been googling around about it but I am not finding anything I haven't tried already and am not sure how to debug this.
My team supports a website for a client, and we use SendGrid to send email related to the site on their behalf.
We do not have anything to do with their own email server and I don't at present know anything about it.
So far as I can work out, SendGrid has proper authentication and is an authorised sender for their domain, and almost 98% of email is delivered successfully.
However, we have had a handful of bounces with the reason "550 relaying denied" and all of these were to addresses at our client's domain (the same one as their website and the from address of the emails.)
Most emails to their domain were delivered successfully.
Unfortunately I don't have access to the full headers of the bounce emails, only the reason.
I understand that in general this error can either be caused by
the sender not being authenticated correctly. I am very far from being an expert in this but so far as I can tell, there is nothing wrong there. Or
a DNS or similar misconfiguration on the part of the recipient's email domain. I have even less understanding about this and I have no access or responsibility for the client's email server.
My main question is, is there any way the domain being the same as the from address could be related? Being as the email is claiming to be from the same place it's sent to, is it possible for that to affect how it's handled by relays?
If not, I'd also appreciate any pointers on where to look for the issue (or what to advise the client to look at if the problem is likely to be from their end.) I have been trying to research issues with email configuration and authentication but I am very much a novice in this area.
Thanks in advance.
The domain being the same could very well be related, but normally when that happens, the receiving server refuses all mail purporting to be from itself.
Separate from DKIM & SPF, most mail servers believe they alone are responsible for the mail from their domain.com. As such, a lot of them have anti-phishing filters that reject "outside" mail that claims to be from themselves. It's like "You can't be Carrie, I'm Carrie! Go Away!"
The fact that it's only some mail is interesting. The error being relay denied may also be key, though these anti-phishing filters often use "fake" errors to not give away the game.
Do the recipients of the messages that are being rejected have some kind of internal forwarding applied? That may be the cause, in which case that bounce reason is honest.
Or they may have a more defined anti-phishing feature, only rejecting mail From or For certain addresses. You can try testing certain combinations, and see if anything is repeatable.
Ultimately however, it will come down to working with the receiving mail domain's admin, and either updating those rules, or whitelisting the SendGrid IPs that are sending the mail to them.
I've searched all around, made several changes over the past two weeks, and still no luck so here I am.
We just put up a new site, and there are 3 different forms. Each form sends to a different email of theirs, a forwarder that sends to the same email of theirs (I had to make this after I figured out there was a problem with them not receiving emails from the website), and one of our emails.
Currently, they use office 365 for their email. A few days ago I figured out to change the SPF record, so I added the IP of their current website.
Here is the current SPF record:
v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com ip4:23.229.157.193 a ~all
I'm stumped. I've sent test submissions, and they receive the forward, and I receive it from my email, but the email that it's supposed to be sent to doesn't receive it.
I don't have access to their office 365 account. I tried a different option of sending the emails through swiftmailer, but GoDaddy doesn't allow me to connect to their smtp details, so that's a bust.
Has anyone encountered this problem before and know of a solution? All help is greatly appreciated.
THE SOLUTION:
After hours of calling, I was able to get the problem solved. I should have edited this earlier, but better late than never. In cPanel, there is an area for routing mail. It was set to local, rather than remote. Every email that came through went to the local emails, and since their were none, they were discarded. After changing the option to remote, the emails started flowing through. After the 3rd or 4th call, I reached someone who's actually dealt with this problem because he explained what was happening and the fix in under two minutes, unlike the others. I hope this helps anyone in the future with the same problems I encountered.
If you've configured SPF on your sending smtp server, you can configure a _dmarc
DNS record with an email address for the receiving server to send mail reports to...
Better yet, if this 'new' server is not required to be fully operational while you set up everything - you can set the _dmarc record to tell the receiving server to reject anything that doesn't pass the SPF test.
In any case, if you are setting up an email server that will send messages to any outside Internet address, and you have the ability to install software on the server - you should install and configure:
SPF, DKIM, and have a dmarc DNS record.
If you don't have these items, it's very likely much of your site's notification email will end up in the subscribers' spam box, or worse rejected by the receiving server.
Several good websites that have helped me:
unlocktheinbox.com
dmarcian.com
emailsecuritygrader
protodave.com dkim key checker
appmaildev.com domainkeys test
gettingemaildelivered.com
Having problems with setting up my website to use MS Exchange to send emails. I dont want to use the hosts email system.
The MS Exhange has been set up, with email addresses created.
My webpages are using Persits.MailSender which the host supports.
Do i need to change MX records? A records?
Sorry, im not clued up with network side of things, any help would be appreciated
When i email direct, the email address on the exchange picks up the emails. BUT if i email through the website, it goes to the annoying webmail the host is provinding, and not to the exchange
I find this strange, the same email address receiving emails at different places!
Im using ASP, and I have a website set up, which has been sending emails for the last 12 months, the host has messed up (again) somewhere, but doesnt know what is wrong (as usual)
There are no errors, the email always gets sent.... but to the wrong place.
I would look into actually trapping and knowing your errors. That way you can see precisely why it fails and have something to work with. As it stands, your question isn't really answerable. No language nor framework is provided. We don't know if the mail server is confirmed to be working or accessible outside your netowrk; we don't know how your are referencing it or if you are passing user credentials; we don't know what error you're getting...
At this point, you're not debugging, you're just sort of swinging in the dark. Find the point of failure and then research that data point to get a solution. Debug, catch errors, log, step through your code. All good ideas.
Ok i figured it out, I deleted the mail domain on the host as that was the first place the website looks to send an email. Once the mail domain was deleted the emails were sent to the external hosted mailserver MS Exchange email address. Yay!
I have a domain, call it mydom.com.
A while ago I started using Google App's email server. I set up MX and the rest of the stuff records as Google wanted, and all is working well since.
On www.mydom.com I have a website, DNS and still running mail server (which basically doesn't do much).
Among other things, on www.mydom.com, I have some contact form - basic php page that takes user's input and sends it to predefined email address at mydom.com. It sends it with php's sendmail function.
My issue is - all those email that get sent from localhost to *#mydom.com (by php's function, or possible by some cron jobs reporting some issues) DO NOT go to Google's email servers but instead get picked up by localhost and it's mail server.
So far, I was resolving this issue by setting up a new mail account at Google account, which was basically calling my local mail server by it's IP address, logging into old, abandoned email account and pulling those misplaced emails to the new, #mydom.com account at Google App.
Obviously I'm missing some entry either in local DNS, host file or something..
Does anyone know how do I fix it?
Hey, the same question was asked here: https://serverfault.com/questions/102647/sendmail-to-local-domain-ignoring-mx-records-part-2
and the answer to it works for me, don't forget to include the dot after the domain!
If it doesn't work to the test call and see how the mail traces.
best of luck, svullo