[thelist] email problems - any ideas??

[Phil Turmel]

Daryl Brown wrote:
[snip /]
> Sometimes emails get through to this address, but sometimes they don't -
> which is a bit disconcerting.
> 
> The emails *some* of my clients try to send to me don't bounce back as
> undeliverable, but just disappear. I don't seem to have this problem with my
> other addresses that have been setup in the same way.
> 
> I'm based in Australia, my shared server is based in the States, my domains
> are pointed from Australia...
> 
> Could it be individual isp routing issues??? some of my clients having
> problem with this address are using pretty main stream isps...
> 

Hi Daryl,

Been there.  I lost a lot of e-mails when one relay in my chain would 
mis-interpret an "invalid sender" as an "invalid recipient".  Spammers 
would put a fake return address in my own domain, like "xyz at turmel.org", 
and my server would deny it with "invalid sender".  The stupid relay 
would cache the denial as "real-address at turmel.org is a bad recipient", 
and then throw good e-mails away.  Grrrrr.

I had to change my server to silently discard such emails.

In any case, you probably want to start with an audit of your host's DNS 
setup.  I've found this site helpful:

http://www.dnsreport.com/

Run through both the DNS report and the Mail Test.

If you still lose e-mails after fixing everything these audits report, 
start combing through your server mail log files for denial reasons.

HTH,

Phil