Setting up a legitimate mail server

What a LOT of e-mail severs will do is when they receive email that says it from johndoe@somewhere.com, they will do a reverse lookup on the IP address that is sending the e-mail, then they do a forward lookup on what is returned.  If the two do not match they reject the e-mail.

In your case, you may think this is legitimate, but what you are doing is mis-representing where the e-mail is truly coming from, which is considered against the laws.

I do a lot of business with Auto Dealers.  Most dealerships incorporate a CRM tool that allows them to manage all of their customers and prospects.  They also use this tool to send emails.  There are thousands of dealers across that United States that use CRM's.  When they implement a CRM each employee will get a email address provided to them.  Let's say the CRM name is Dealerpeak.  Everyone will have a name@dealerpeak.com email account.  However when the sales rep from Joe's Honda sends out an email to his prospect it will say repname@joeshonda.com.  Now if you look at the email header you will see clearly that the email is orginating and tracing back to mail.dealerpeak.com.  Now they do this with all of their clients.  Every dealership has their own internal email account and the CRM's spoof their emails with the dealerships name and email address.  The emails are not coming from the dealerships mail server but the CRM shows that it does.  The CRM industry is a billion dollar business.  I find it hard to belive that they are all breaking the law.

I'm hoping that this isn't black and white.  I don't know if I'm breaking the law.  I sure hope i'm not because that would really screw up my software.  
Thoughts?

Thanks.

I am assuming that you mean Customer Relationship Management tool.  Not sure, our CRM tool is setup to say that it is coming from @mydomain.com, not @someotherdomain.com.  In fact ever CRM tool I have worked on was setup like this.  

However, I have only worked in enviroments where the company was actually running the CRM tool in-house.  I have not worked in any enviroments where a 3rd party was hosting it.  

When the CRM software you have dealt with issued the HELO/EHEL command to the remote SMTP server what domain name does it use?

Which header shows that it is actually coming from dealerpeak.com?

All the CRM's that I have dealt with are third party.

They EHLO would be outbound.dealerpeak.com.
They HELO would be fe1.mail.dealerpeak.com.

I can assure that they successfully do this.  All the traces go back to dealerpeak and their IP.  However when you receive the email unless you looked at the headers you would never know it was from dealerpeak.  It would show that it is coming directly from the dealership.

Also, dealerpeak is just one example.  There are many many CRM's that do this.

I looked at Dealer Peak and it seems they are full hosting sevice: Web, CRM, and e-mail.  If they are hosting the dealers e-mail sevice, then they will be able to send e-mail as though it came from joeshonda.com, as they are the hosting sevice for joeshonda and so it is coming from joeshonda's e-mail sever.

This is not a issue you can solve, this is how some companies and ISP's hace setup their inbound e-mail severs work.   It is not a problem with your software, it is a issue with the fact that the IP address that the e-mail is coming from, does not map back to a domain name that matches where the e-mail is coming from.

Ok.  I'm with you.  Our set up is flawed.  There must be a way around this.  What if I set up a legitimate mail server and give everyone an email account from my server, name@myserver.com.  I send out all the emails from my server.  The only thing that I will need is the recipient to be able to reply back to the email and have it go to joeshonda.com.  Also, it would be nice if it looked like it came from joeshonda.com.

You've given me a lot of bad news.  Please tell me there is light at the end of the tunnel.