E-mails not going through to a few clients

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GrootBaas

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Don't know what section this should go, but in any case.

Our business moved over to a new ISP (ADSL and hosting) at the beginning of this month. Everything is going smoothly but we can't seem to email out to a few clients (90% are working) and get an Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender error back. Also included is this link, something about openspf.

The ISP is looking into it, but it is getting really annoying right about now as we can't contact some clients. It only happened when we moved over to the new ISP.

By checking that error message, does anyone have any ideas - I don't have know enough to figure this one out. I have changed ports and outgoing mail servers as much as I can. Seems like they are cybersmart resellers, but smtp.cybersmart.co.za doesn't work.

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.100.1
3 60 ms 59 ms 60 ms 1.35.177.41-discover.co.za [41.177.35.1]
4 34 ms 36 ms 36 ms ct1-ipc-up.cybersmart.co.za [196.6.121.38]
5 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms google.cinx.net.za [196.223.22.41]
6 52 ms 49 ms 45 ms 64.233.174.105
7 112 ms * 66 ms cpt01s01-in-f16.1e100.net [74.125.233.16]
 
By the way, it all seems to be emails we are trying to send to domains hosted by Afrihost.
 
I think there might be an spf record that needs to be added on your ISP DNS with your domain.
To test if you can infact see the outgoing smtp you will need to do a telnet command,

in cmd promt

telnet mx.myserver.co.za 25

you should get a hello reply.
 
Keegan said:
I think there might be an spf record that needs to be added on your ISP DNS with your domain.
To test if you can infact see the outgoing smtp you will need to do a telnet command,

in cmd promt

telnet mx.myserver.co.za 25

you should get a hello reply.
Click to expand...

I just get a "Connect failed" reply.
 
that means, that the smtp server is either down or you not using the correct address. are you telnet smtp.cybersmart.co.za ? because I can telnet it fine...

check if you can telnet any other server i.e smtp.gmail.com

I assume that the internet connectivity is working fine on the pc you are telneting from... :)
 
Ah, I have tried so many smtp server the last two days I typed in the wrong one, sorry. It is mail.bso.co.za :p

Right if I type that in, this is the reply :

220 cm.snowballeffect.net ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)

...and then nothing.
 
That link you posted seems to state that the SPF for the bso.co.za domain is incorrect,but I don't get any SPF records back when requesting them,so I suspect you need to add an SPF record to your DNS
 
PsyWulf said:
That link you posted seems to state that the SPF for the bso.co.za domain is incorrect,but I don't get any SPF records back when requesting them,so I suspect you need to add an SPF record to your DNS
Click to expand...

Is this hard to do? I am just trying to figure out why the ISP can't seem to fix it.
 
Whoever maintains the bso.co.za domain (DNS specifically ) has to add a TXT record to the DNS
 
I also ran across this problem the other day so I went about implementing the TXT record. Not easy I can tell you, so what I decided to do is actually find out which other big domains do this already. Found out not many in fact.

Here is the tool http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html

Some big ones work, some dont. IE: bmw.com no, amazon.com yes etc etc. I know that gmail requires it, but if you test is.co.za they don't have SPF records, but mail goes through.
 
SPF and domainkeys are the future of antispam. SMTP has become a very bloated beast from the original implementation,but the reason people aren't really implementing SPF and domainkeys is because so few have already,when it's not a very complex thing to do :P
 
Thanks guys. Back from the long weekend and seems like the problem has been fixed by adding the SPF record after I pointed it out to them.
 
You also had a typo in your SPF record before

The domain bso.co.za has published an SPF policy, however, an error occurred while the receiving mail server tried to evaluate the policy:

Invalid IPv4 prefix length encountered in 'ip4:196.201.6.0/234'.
 
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