Re: Newbie question: Exim - trouble receiving incoming emails

[Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl>]

On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 08:33:04 -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:

[ snip: Jon Dowland's nice mini-tutorial about dig and MX records ] 

> okay, so I had to try this to learn and 
> 
> andrew@basement:~$ dig +short bigpond.com mx
> 10 extmail.bigpond.com.
> 
> andrew@basement:~$ ping www.bigpond.com
> PING www.bigpond.com (144.135.18.32) 56(84) bytes of data.
> 64 bytes from 144.135.18.32: icmp_seq=1 ttl=233 time=212 ms
> 
> cool, but...
> 
> andrew@basement:~$ ping extmail.bigpond.com
> PING extmail.bigpond.com (144.140.80.13) 56(84) bytes of data.
> 64 bytes from extmail.bigpond.com (144.140.80.13): icmp_seq=1 ttl=234
> time=364 ms
> 
> that's a different IP. looks to me like the MX record is wrong.
> 
> Am I doing that right?

I think you should send yourself a test email via bigpond and check the
header for the appropriate IP address in the "Received:" field(s). It is
not unusual that the web server's IP is different from the one of the
mail server.

Also, additional authorized mail servers can be specified with an spf
entry (http://www.openspf.org/SPF_Record_Syntax) in the TXT field:

$ dig +short bigpond.com txt
"v=spf1 ip4:144.140.81.0/24 ip4:144.140.82.0/23 ip4:144.140.91.0/24 ip4:144.140.92.0/23 ?all"

-- 
Regards,
          Florian