Mail problems caused by invalid reverse DNS?

[bkark]

Is anyone having problems with sending mail to the major mail services like Hotmail and Yahoo!? I've noticed that Yahoo! is sending every message to a spam folder, but even worse, Hotmail seems to be dropping all my mail without any sort of bounce message.

So far my only guess as to the cause of the problem is that my IPs don't have a valid reverse DNS entry. Here's what I get at DNSStuff.com:

xxx.xx.xxx.xx PTR record: *vzr1-23.hostican.com.* [TTL 14400s] [A=208.79.200.2] **ERROR** A record for vzr1-23.hostican.com. does not point back to original IP (A record may be cached).

According to Hotmail they require a valid reverse DNS entry and even though my IPs do have entries, as you can see above, they aren't valid. I wish Hotmail would bounce something back to me so I would know for sure but until that happens I have to assume that this is the problem.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

[roger]

What is the sending domain? And... did you register your NS servers?

[bkark]

The sending domains are kark.ws and bayrecorders.org. I manage my nameservers through DynDNS.com and have updated them to reflect the new IP addresses of my server.

[Scott]

I did a check on those two sites and didn't see any issues with them being on spam blacklists so it is something else. Just FYI.

[bkark]

How do I go about getting the reverse DNS entries for my two IPs changed? Even if this isn't the cause of my mail problems, it still needs to fixed.

[lnxcode]

It's not the cause of the problems. All the other vps's on this node for example don't have RDNS setup and they all work fine? Hotmail & such only demand that you have a PTR not matter where it points to.

However, we're going to see what we can do, its currently with our DNS folks...

[Shazam]

I wanted to add that I am currently using my PR and marketing contacts at Microsoft to try to nail down this Hotmail issue. As you might expect, navigating that company's byzantine bureaucracy is difficult.

But I will persevere until all the Hotmail issues are resolved, so be patient folks

[lnxcode]

Originally Posted by Shazam

I wanted to add that I am currently using my PR and marketing contacts at Microsoft to try to nail down this Hotmail issue. As you might expect, navigating that company's byzantine bureaucracy is difficult.

But I will persevere until all the Hotmail issues are resolved, so be patient folks

If you knew who Shazam really is.... you would believe his words too.

[Shazam]

Originally Posted by lnxcode

If you knew who Shazam really is.... you would believe his words too.

Why, the world's mightiest mortal of course

[bkark]

Thanks guys!

In order to get reverse DNS working am I able to setup an in-addr.arpa zone through WHM? I was originally using DynDNS for my nameservers but have switched to using BIND on my box hoping that I can setup the reverse DNS myself. If I can, is there anything else that needs to be done to get this all working?

FYI, I just looked at the reverse DNS again for my IPs and now it's saying vzr1-23.hostican.com has no PTR record. I assume you guys removed the PTR record recently?