HELO Greeting

[OneApplications]

Hi there!

Can someone clarify what your SMTP HELO greeting should be? Currently mine is showing VPS Hosting.mydomain.co.uk. This gives the following error in dnsstuff...

mail.oneapplications.co.uk claims to be non-existent host VPS Hosting.oneapplications.co.uk:
220 VPS Hosting.oneapplications.co.uk ESMTP


I don't have the hostname VPS Hosting.mydomain.co.uk set in my dns. This may well fix this issue but shouldn't the HELO greeting just be the domain name itself or maybe mail.mydomain.co.uk, which of course IS set in dns.

The reason I'm asking is that I'm still having problems delivering email to Hotmail accounts. They simply never get there (even in the junk mail) and I don't get a return message either!! Very odd!

Any help greatly appreciated.

Chris.

[eUKhost.com]

Hello Chris,

Are you sending emails through webmail ?

Emails will be sent out using hostname of the server if you use webmail, so you need to set proper A records and rDNS for your VPS Hosting. You can contact our VPS Hosting Support Team and ask them to get this sorted for you.

[OneApplications]

Hi,

All I'm doing at the moment is using a simple phpmailer script to send a test email to a few different webmail accounts (I've set a few up with hotmail, yahoo, gmail etc just to test delivery).

I'm not able to get the full headers from most of these but when I send the same mail to another one of my domains that uses Horde webmail I get the following header...

Return-Path:
Delivered-To: 825-support@oneapplications.com
Received: (qmail 11438 invoked from network); 13 Feb 2008 08:23:57 -0600
Received: from oneapplications.co.uk (HELO VPS Hosting.oneapplications.co.uk) (92.48.82.30)
by nora.netpivotal.com with (DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA encrypted) SMTP; 13 Feb 2008 08:23:57 -0600
Received: (qmail 26032 invoked from network); 13 Feb 2008 13:44:29 +0000
Received: from oneapplications.co.uk (HELO www.oneapplications.co.uk) (92.48.82.30)
by oneapplications.co.uk with SMTP; 13 Feb 2008 13:44:29 +0000
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:44:29 +0000
Return-Path: noreply@oneapplications.co.uk
To: oneapplications@yahoo.com, oneapplications@googlemail.com, oneapplications@aol.com, support@oneapplications.com
From: OneApplications Activations
Reply-To: noreply@oneapplications.co.uk
Subject: OneApps Email Test Script
Message-ID:
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: PHPMailer (phpmailer.sourceforge.net) [version 2.0.0 rc3]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="b1_a1b210e40c9b9a39466ff9507505cfb8"


Obviously this wasn't sent using my oneapplications.co.uk webmail, it was just from the phpmailer test script but one of the HELO greetings is still VPS Hosting.oneapplications.co.uk. If this is normal then that's fine. I will probably simply change my VPS Hosting hostname in Plesk to something like server1.oneapplications.co.uk and then set an A record for this hostname.

Does any of that make much sense??

Cheers,

Chris.

[eUKhost.com]

Hello Chris,

You can change hostname from Plesk and add A record for the hostname. Once you add A record then you can contact our VPS Hosting Team and ask them to set rDNS for your VPS Hosting. You wont face any problems with Yahoo and hotmail emails once you have correct rDNS for your VPS Hosting.

[OneApplications]

Ok, thanks for that.

I've just set the hostname as server.oneapplications.co.uk and also set an A record to the primary IP. I have actually already got RDNS in place (resolves to "oneapplications.co.uk").

As it stands I don't have a problem getting into the Googlemail or AOL test accounts but it seems like Yahoo and Hotmail are just ignoring my emails. I get no return message and they don't end up in the junk either.

Anyway I need to wait for the DNS to propagate with the new hostname A record and then I'll give it another go.

Fingers crossed!!

[Rock]

Yahoo & Hotmail are famous for changing their email policies overnight...

I never use either of them due to this. Lycos, Gmail, Rediffmail are better solutions to them.

[OneApplications]

Yes tell me about it!

I'm not really able to do much testing at the moment as my VPS Hosting crashed and burnt yesterday just after I made the change to the hostname!! oops!

It seems there may have been a "glitch" in Plesk that caused a config file to be incorrectly modified. This in turn stopped BIND running and the whole thing came to a stand still.

Anyway the VPS Hosting support team have now got it going again. Thanks guys!! Still can't access the web site hosting yet but I'm hoping that's just a DNS propagartion issue. Anyway once things are running again I'll be able to continue trying to crack Hotmail and Yahoo

[OneApplications]

Hi all!

Well I've now managed to get everything back to how it was yesterday following the problems I was having with BIND not running.

I have just sent a few more test emails to AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail. Currently all get through just fine apart from good old HOTMAIL!!!

The odd thing is that I changed my Dedicated Server hostname yesterday in Plesk from VPS Hosting.mydomain.co.uk to server.mydomain.co.uk. When I look at the message headers of the sent test email I'm still seeing a HELO greeting from VPS Hosting.mydomain.co.uk.

Any ideas where this is coming from??

Cheers,

Chris.

[flesso]

You need to set the hostname manually in the MailEnable CP. If you go through all the tree diagrams within the left pane, you should reach one labeled 'Connectors', or similar. Expand that tree and then right click on the MailEnable SMTP service and select 'Properties'. This will then come up with a pane of certain options, one of which being the hostname option. Set the options as appropriate (note: you will need to change the postmaster/abuse address(es) to 'postmaster@home'); click all the appropriate 'OK' and 'Apply' buttons, then restart the MailEnable SMTP service.

[OneApplications]

Hi all,

Thanks for the replies. I actually used SSH in the end to alter the hostname. It's set in the var/qmail/control/me file. I simply set this to be mail.mydomain.co.uk.

At this point dnsstuff reports everything A OK with my website hosting.

I also set an SPF record to include my Dedicated Server IP and now would you believe it Hotmail receives all my emails with no problems at all!!

I'm not 100% sure what single thing cracked it so I'll list all the things I have setup on my VPS Hosting just incase anyone else has similar issues getting into Hotmail etc...

1. Add your domain to the Hotmail SenderID program.
2. Add an SPF record to your DNS (mydomain.co.uk TXT v=spf1 ip4: xx.xx.xx.xx -all)
3. Make sure your SMTP hostname is set to be your mail server's name.
4. Ensure you have RDNS for your domain.

I think that's about it!!