cblaisd

Update and plea for help....

I did leave the domain name registraiton with GoDaddy, but moved the email hosting to said local isp.

It has been a disaster and the customer service that was so good 5-6 years ago really has degenerated.

Here's the situation.

That email hosting setup at said isp has

1) A "real" inbox ([email protected]) where I get fetch my email via pop3
2) A second real inbox for Mrs. cblaisd where she fetches hers via pop3

The email hosting also has email forwarding set up as follows:

3) A forwarding alias from [email protected] to my real inbox
4) Same for Mrs. cblaisd for hers
5) An alias that forwards to one of the cblaisd children at their real email address
6) A second alias for a second child that does the same.

The problem:

Both I and Mrs. cblaisd are now having consistent problems with emails to us at [email protected] and [email protected] bouncing back to the sender. There's no rhyme or reason to it, but a few long-time correspondents report that ALL of their email to either of us bounce, and then there are other long-time correspondents who get their email to us randomly bounced.

Despite numerous requests for help from my local isp to find out why such bouncing is occuring, they are totally unhelpful and unwilling to look and see if they screwed something up when they moved the email hosting for my domain name to them.

It's gotten so bad (I have a staff member whose email to me consistently bounces) I now need to move my email hosting somewhere else that I can set up to forward mail to those for [email protected] to real inboxes.

But I am scared I'll screw something up.

So, baby steps and small words, please. Some have recommended Google Apps for domains and I'm open to that, but need some very explicit handholding about how to move the email hosting to them. Or other providers are welcome too. Given that I and Mrs. cblaisd depend on these [email protected] emails getting through to us, I don't want to make things any worse than they are.

TIA!

FastTrak2Elite

One thing that might help you troubleshoot - the "bounce" messages (actually called "non-delivery report") are not generic - they contain details about WHY they bounced. As for your seemingly random bounces - I would suspect there are multiple MX records set up for your domain. If there are (for example) 3, and one of those is misconfigured, you could potentially lose one third of the email being sent.

If you want to PM me your domain names (both yours and ISP's) I can perform some lookups for you.

Stuart

superangrypenguin

Pm me and ill fix this for you. In case you dont want to here's what you need to do.

Seize the domain
Get a mail service
Setup the MX record on the domain to point to the new mail service
Setup the email accounts
Wait until the TTL...uhh...dies
Job done.

slowmail

If able, post a copy of the bounce messages. It will at least tell you the reason *why* the mails are bouncing.

cblaisd

I'd post, but I don't want to expose my sender's email address and name to the world.

FastTrak2Elite

cblasid sent my the NDR via PM. I've redacted the email address and pasted the pertinent part:

Action: failedStatus: 5.1.1Diagnostic-Code:
smtp; 550 5.7.1 <[email protected]>... Relaying
deniedLast-attempt-Date: <date/time>

That's the problem right there!

DYKWIA

Obviously

cblaisd

So what does the isp where the email is hosted have to do to fix this!?

Or is it time to move the email hosting somewhere else.

FastTrak2Elite

Having exchanged a number of emails with OP from both hosted email and hotmail address, (all successful) I've reached the limit of what might be happening here.

I'm going to have a further dig around, but if any one else wants to chip in, now is the time

tehiota

Relaying means that the receiving mail server doesn't expect to see that domain being received. You basically need to look at the full headers of a successful message and a NDR notice and compare the route.

Is the vanity domain properly pointing (A record or CNAME to the ISP's mail servers) ? If it's not, there's probably a TTL issue somewhere.

If it is pointing to the properly ISP's mail servers, does it point into a DNS record with multiple servers behind it ? (Round Robin) If so, you may want to manually open up a connection to each on port 25 and try sending a test email to @vanitydomain.com and see if you get a 'Accept' or Relaying-Denied. It's possible that not all the ISP's SMTP Servers are accepting for the vanity domain and because of the nature of DNS Round robin, why it would work sometimes, but not all times.

Was the NDR from the vanity relay or the ISP SMTP Server?

cblaisd

Enormous thanks to FastTrak for all his help. Turns out the isp that hosts my email service had an incorrect/missing MX entry. I sent FastTrak's correction on to this isp's support folks and they corrected and so far email from at least one person who ALWAYS previously bounced came through fine. Fngers crossed.

I recognize some of those words.... But thank you! If my gladness turns out to have been premature I'll work with someone to follow up on what you wrote.

ScottC

Still worth considering a new ISP as this one sounds like it is pretty weak.

cblaisd

Agreed. Would love to have some baby-step instructions on where and how to do so. (You may have forgotten how I totally almost munged a previous move many years ago and you had to save my, uh, bacon.)

ScottC

The migration to GoDaddy and Google is essentially a one-step trick. You can also move your entire domain over to Google, and they'll take care of everything, with no settings required on your end.

Still, if/when something does go wrong, Google is able to provide support nowadays, but on the other hand - now you have it working, perhaps it is best to just leave it as is. If it ain't broke (any more), don't fix it.

cblaisd

Going to give it a few days and see if I get any more reports of bounced emails. If not, will probably leave as is but keep the Google option in mind if things go sour again. I presume there is likely a link that explains or step-by-step coaches the process of a move of email hosting and/or domain to Google.

Thanks!