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Unable to send e-mail to AOL and Yahoo addresses from exchange server

We have a client who is unable to send e-mail from their domain exchange server (using Brighthouse as ISP) to any e-mail address at AOL and Yahoo. They can send e-mail to any other address. We are able to send e-mail from their server to our domain e-mail in under 60 seconds.

24 hours after the e-mail has been sent to any AOL or Yahoo address, a message is received back to the sending address stating their e-mail has been delayed. Within a few days, a message comes back stating the e-mail was never received.

This site is able to receive all e-mail from any site including AOL and Yahoo addresses, but they are unable to send to any Yahoo or AOL address.

Does anyone have any ideas? Brighthouse support states everything is fine on their end, Yahoo doesn't seem to have a way to contact support, and AOL will not talk to us unless we provide a member screenname which we do not have.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Brad

SOLUTION

PanicX

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Sembee

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plimpias

They have implemented reverse dns lookup. Log into a computer outside of your network, a home computer with a different ip address scheme. Start - run type in nslookup.

Type in mail.yourdomain.com

Then grab the ip that it gave you and type that again in the next line

X.X.X.X

this should return mail.yourdomain.com, if it doesn't then this might be your problem. you might need to contact your dns hosting provider and ask them if they support reverse dns.

AOL & Road Runner use this feature.

plimpias

I pretty conident that my solution will fix your problem. Try what the test.

bradhfl

ASKER

We searched our client's IP address and mail.ourdomain.com against all blacklists and it does not show them listed. Thank you Simon on the tip for AOL Postmaster. This enabled us to contact Roadrunner to get the ball rolling on their end. We tried a telnet to one of AOL's mail servers as instructed on AOL's site and it rejected our client's session stating it is a residential IP address and/or dynamic. Our client's IP is static, so we notified Roadrunner to contact the AOL Postmaster and they are working on it.

We also found an article online about received spam causing e-mail to be sent out using our client's postmaster@ourdomain.com address (See KB 886208). We found this when we noticed a few e-mails trying to go out to a bizfl@Yahoo.com address using our client's exchange server. We also finally tracked down Yahoo's contact us page for their Postmaster to have them re-test our client's IP address for receiving e-mail from our client's e-mail server.

Still working on it, so we hope to find a resolution soon. Plimpias, the DNS is indeed setup correctly. Thanks.

SOLUTION

Sembee

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bradhfl

ASKER

Thanks Simon. We tried the SMTP connector using Roadrunner's SMTP server: smtp-server.tampabay.rr.com and also tried it by IP address. Following your instructions, we setup the connector for only problem domains (yahoo.com/aol.com) since all others are working. It is still not sending e-mail to Yahoo.com and AOL.com addresses. It sits in the queue and then when it tries to send it out, the queue status changes to retry and it resets the scheduled send time for 15 minutes later, but it still never sends it out. Eventually it just expires and then sends a message back to the sender that the e-mail was not delivered to the recipient.

Sembee

Do you have to authenticate when using their SMTP server?
Can you actually connect to that server from yours?

telnet smtp-server.tampabay.rr.com 25

Simon.

bradhfl

ASKER

I thought about that too. Here is what comes back when trying your line above:

220 ms-smtp-04.tampabay.rr.com ESMTP Welcome to Road Runner. WARNING: *** FOR AUTHORIZED USE ONLY! ***

Sembee

Can you actually send email through that server?
Do a full telnet test.
http://www.amset.info/exchange/telnet-test.asp

Simon.

bradhfl

ASKER

Simon,

We tried the full telnet test and it worked like a charm. We finally got to the bottom of this and determined that Yahoo and AOL have been blocking our IP address. We finally got Yahoo to lift the block and we are working on AOL.

We still do not understand why the SMTP connector that you mentioned before does not work as we have double checked the instructions and our settings. It seems fairly simple, so it doesn't make any sense why we can't get it to work. Oh well, at least the client is able to send e-mail again to Yahoo addresses. Thanks guys.