Re: [OT] Hotmail calls mail from my server spam; how do I contact them?
On Fri, 13 May 2005 19:58:07 -0600
"Monique Y. Mudama" <spam@bounceswoosh.org> wrote:
> Has anyone had to contact hotmail about this kind of thing?
>
> Mail from my server automatically gets put in the spam folder. My
> server isn't blacklisted as far as I know, and it's a static IP.
>
> My ISP said:
>
> "Does your mail server have a PTR entry in your DNS zone file? Without
> one, many hosts may reject your email. Basically a receiving host will
> do a reverse lookup to make sure that the incoming email traces back
> to the originating (sending) server IP - if it cannot resolve it, then
> the email will be rejected. A PTR is an entry in your DNS zone file
> that is referenced when a server does a reverse lookup. "
>
> ... but that doesn't make sense to me. I have different A and MX
> records for the domain, specifically so that I can use a hosted web
> service while serving mail on a different machine. If that weren't
> perfectly legit, why even have the concept of an MX record?
I'm afraid that I don't have much help in the way of suggestions. I can
say that your server IP has a correct PTR record, though. When I run "mx
bounceswoosh.org" it returns the first mx record as
home.bounceswoosh.org and "host home.bounceswoosh.org" then returns
66.17.169.80. If you do one more host - this time "host 66.17.169.80"
you will see it returns 'home.bounceswoosh.org' <- the PTR record.
According to openrbl.org, the only dnsbl you're on is blackholes.us -
they maintain lists of IP blocks belonging to ISPs and Yipes (which is
the ISP that 66.17.169.80 appears to belong to). Chances are pretty slim
of making it off that blacklist, but I wouldn't have thought that
Hotmail would be checking it, either.
My only other thought would be having the hotmail users add your e-mail
address to their address book, if they haven't already. AOL users are
told to do this for e-mail they do not want marked as spam; maybe
Hotmail is intelligent enough to watch for this too?
HTH,
Jacob
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