Re: Newbie question: Exim - trouble receiving incoming emails

["Duncan McDonald" <duncan_mcdonald@ieee.org>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andrew Sackville-West" <andrew@farwestbilliards.com>
To: <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2007 3:33 AM
Subject: Re: Newbie question: Exim - trouble receiving incoming emails

> 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?

> A

Hi Andrew,

Bigpond.com isn't my site, it's the ISP that I have registered my domain 
name with (ie encomium.com.au) and it seems to resolve fine via http, ssh 
and ping.

Any email to <user>@encomium.com.au however gets the 'No server' message.

All I'm really trying to figure out is whether my mail server settings are 
wrong or whether my ISP is redirecting my email traffic to force me to 
purchase extra mailboxes on their servers. Is it possible for a DNS provider 
to redirect traffic to a domain on a particular port (ie 25 and 110)?

Also if they are redirecting my mail to an account on their servers, say 
blah@bigpond.com, would it be possible to set this account up as the primary 
mail repository? That is, if all email traffic for my site was directed into 
this account, would it be possible to set my server up to download the 
messages via POP, sort them by username, then forward them to the respective 
recipients?

-Duncan