Not getting email - from yahoo only

F

fivenines

Verified User
Joined
Dec 7, 2010
Messages
17
Not getting email - from yahoo addresses only

I have a rather weird problem: One of our DA accounts cannot receive email originating from any yahoo.com email address. What happens is that the yahoo sender gets a 550 bounce back:

Remote host said: 550 relay not permitted [RCPT_TO]

I did a check myself, from my own yahoo account. I then checked the exim logs - and found nothing at all. The panic log is empty, and both the reject and main logs had no relevant entries to my bounce back.

This particular domain can receive email from other domains with no trouble, and, it can send email to yahoo or anywhere else. In addition, we have other DA accounts on this server that can receive email from yahoo accounts. It's almost like it's some sort of MX routing issue, just for this one domain account.

I have checked this link:

http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=16

We are all OK there, except maybe for step 9 - I was not sure how to check the reverse lookup.

We are running CentOS 5.5 x64. Thanks in advance for any sound advice! :)
 
Last edited:
There has to be something in the logs somewhere.

Make sure you dont have yahoo in any blacklist file in /etc/virtual and that the user didnt have it blocked in spamassassin settings.

You should also check the full headers of the email to see if it gives any more information and that the server was indeed your server sending the message.
 
Last edited:
There is nothing blacklisted in /etc/virtual, and individual spamassassin settings is not an issue, because we have tested with 3 different email accounts on this domain. Nothing from yahoo gets thru to any of the 3 accounts. We have also tried to send from 3 different yahoo email accounts - same bounce back message.

I checked the exim logs thoroughly - I saw nothing.

One thing I did notice in the header of the bounce back email: The
"In-Reply-To" domain name differs from the domain that the email is destined to (the domain experiencing the issue). Could this be the problem?
 
I should check the MX-records page @ DirectAdmin for the user. Also maybe the line with a select box is not selected but unselected, so it doesn't use the mailserver?
 
If yahoo is getting a 550 error when it tries to send email to your domain, and your logs don't show your server sending any 550 error, then yahoo isn't looking at your server. Check the MX records for the domains with the problem.

Jeff
 
Yahoo email issue - resolved

Jeff,

That was the problem: It was an MX record issue for the domain, and a simple fix. The strange thing is, other email worked fine. Apparently there were (are) DNS inconsistencies around the Internet, at least when it comes to MX records.

Thanks all for your input :)
 
Generally DNS inconstencies can occur if you're running longish TTL times.

We use TTL of 600 (ten minutes) to help avoid DNS problems.

Jeff
 
Jeff,

That makes sense in this situation: We are using 7200 DNS TTL times. This seems to be the default TTL at ZoneEdit, as well as other sites.

Would you recommended 600 seconds for all DNS entries, as a general best practice? Obviously I would like to avoid DNS inconsistencies, wherever possible.
 
I can't recommend it as a best practice because since the start of the DNS system, best practice was always defined as using TTLs as long as possible to avoid excess traffic on the 'net and less load on DNS services.

But servers are much more powerful now than they once were, and connections much faster with much more capacity. I've been using 600 TTL for at least eight years, with no one complaining.

Years ago some ISPs would ignore low TTLs and impose what they thought was correct. I haven't seen proof of that in a long time.

For more information see this article from 2007, and this article, date unknown, which recommends one hour for A records.

Jeff
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top