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Re: [OCLUG-Tech] Strange e-mail bounce message

On 11-11-23 01:10 PM, Bruce Miller wrote:
I have been having strange e-mail reliability problems today.

I am a Rogers customer. I use a personal domain which is hosted in the USA. It has worked for me with only the rarest hiccoughs for between five and ten years. Today, little mail has got through. One friend has forwarded me a bounce message. It shows that the message was rejected at the hosting service's gateway as "Relay access denied." This baffles me because the whole purpose of using that hosting service is to relay all e-mail addressed to my personal domain, depending on the username, to either rogers.com, gmail.com or both. The failure is not total. Some mail is getting through.

Can anyone help me to understand further what is happening.

Precisely because mail to my domain is not getting through normally, please cc any replies to me at rogers at brucemiller1 at rogers.com

Thanks in advance for any insights.

Sounds like a configuration issue at your US hosting facility or worse.

The MTA there should be accepting valid mail for your hosted domain and then handling the forwarding. This is NOT relaying in the sense of the received error message. MTAs a long time ago would handle incoming mail from any domain - not just those it hosted. At the time, open relays allowed people to use any server as their own, without authentication or hosting the domain locally. Now, most MTAs only accept mail for MX domains handled locally, and mail for domains outside is rejected with this type of message.

I would take a look at your DNS records and make sure the MX records are pointed at your hosting partner. If so, the hosting company should be handling your mail. If the MX records are NOT pointing at your hosting partner, your domain records may have been deleted, hijacked or altered. Contact your registrar immediately and make sure you still own your domain. There are lots of scams and schemes out there to try and hijack domains and registrations. Some scammy registrars put your domain on "hold" for renewal before the actual date - to force you to renew with them.

If the MX records are pointing at your hosting company, then they've made some kind of error and need to fix it. Also make sure reverse DNS lookups on the MX records point to your domain - some email transfers check to make sure the MX domain matches in reverse lookup to the target domain.

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Bill Strosberg