[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] How about I just put it in an envelope and put a stamp on it? - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"
Tuesday, March 22, 2005 10:47 PM bradley

How about I just put it in an envelope and put a stamp on it?

Email.  Ugh.

If we don't get spammed to death, SMTP auth attacked, attempted relaying, we can't send the stupid thing out the door.  Brian Livingston of Windows Secrets sent over a link that reminded me of something that we've been battling out here.

Just trying to get the email delivered.

First we had Verizon and their issues, now we've got about 4 or 5 ISPs that are making our lives interesting.  These appear to be causing some of the issues for us:

  • BellSouth
  • DirectWay
  • Rogers
  • Yahoo DSL smtp.sbcglobal.yahoo.com

In these four ISPs, we've found that we're having to put the ISP's IP address of the smarthost rather than the name of the smarthost itself. 

From the tech details:

When the Exchange server delivers the outgoing messages through smarthost, the server queries the MX record of the Fully Qualified Domain Name of the smarthost address.  If the MX [Mail Exchange] record of the smarthost is different from the A record [for example the FQDN is a Cname, and the Cname is pointing to an IP address that doesn't accept email] this will occcur.

Javier pointed out that he was trying to use a smarthost to mail.isp.com but if you perform a MX record lookup on the mail.isp.com you get a bunch of A records that are not that smarthost.  So, as long as a MX record exists on the smarthost and it points to a host that doesn't accept email... Exchange will have issues.

Ugh.

Brian indicated that his consultant found a slightly different variation of a fix for Exchange issues when using DNS to route email that put the ISP's DNS into the Exchange connector.

Somedays you just want to stick a postage stamp on that email and send it don't you?

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# re: How about I just put it in an envelope and put a stamp on it?

Wednesday, March 23, 2005 3:25 AM by bradley

ISP www.crystaltech.com has implemented SPF allowing you to record on their DNS's MX record other smarthost and travelling servers you might use with your valid email and domain names.

They are a fairly early adopter of SPF and you can expect far more ISP to follow this route to try and reduce Spam.

# Ofer-ism of the day - Gotcha when changing ISPs in SBS 2003

Friday, January 12, 2007 2:24 PM by E-Bitz - SBS MVP the Official Blog of the SBS "Diva"

Ofer had an issue where a setting that was manually done in the SMTP settings didn't get changed by the