Another bizzare email problem

[cannon303]

I am having a similar problem as thread entitled Bizare email problem, (Sorry Eukhost wont allow me to post link!) My client cant receive emails from the local council authority. All their other emails get through but something is blocking these particular ones. The council arent having problems sending emails to anyone else only to my client hosted at Eukhost. I don't know whether it is a particular word in the body of the email that is getting blocked like in the above thread - i dont have any spam filters on such as spam assasin. I've reached a dead end and my client is getting less happy by the day..... HELP!

[cannon303]

P.S. I have been on Eukhosts technical support online chat and it's like banging my head at a brick wall they dont offer any solutions other than "Well we did a test and everything is fine" - Obviously There is only so many times i can say to my client "Well we did a test and everything is fine!" before I lose credibility with them! At the moment hosting with Eukhost is just not working.

[DPS Computing]

Unfortunately you can't post links until you reach a certain number of posts as recently spammers have been registering and posting 1 post full of spam and links to unpleasant or off topic pages.

Unless you can post the e-mail here (which I can imagine would be a problem if the e-mail contains personal or sensative information) or think of the words that the spam filters might be blocking then we might hit a bit of a dead wall on the forum.

Have you opened a ticket with support (support.eukhost.com or support[at]eukhost.com) about this issue?

[edit: Sorry I didn't see the 2nd post - if eUKhost have done a test and it has worked but a certain email is getting through from and address it would imply that it is something relating to the content of the email - such as a banned word like you suggested]

[eUK-Nick]

Hello Chris,

Please have a support ticket created. I will have this checked soon. Please do update with the ticket ID & I will have this expediated.

[cannon303]

I dont know what words the emails could contain as we cant receive the emails. Ive just tried sending emails to my client that contains the words "specialist" or "cialis" which is the word flagged up in that other post that i mentioned and they work so it cant be that.

I will try and see if i cant get one of their emails somehow and then post it here but as an alternative thought - I've heard of some big companies using outbound spam filtering. I dont know anything about it but could they stop outgoing emails to non trusted email addresses or non trusted web servers? Is this a possibility? if so how do I solve that???????

[eUK-Nick]

There are a few special words which the latest exim build (filter) does not allow to be delivered at all. Please give us a few sample mails & their headers in the ticket. That would be of immense help.

[cannon303]

Ok I'll get a sample somehow and take out a ticket, but...

Has anyone heard of what i said above? Basically - I've heard of some big companies (such as the local authority that is trying to email my client and getting bounce backs) using outbound spam filtering. I dont know anything about it but could they stop outgoing emails to non trusted email addresses or non trusted web/email servers? Is this a possibility? if so how do I solve that???????

[247h]

Originally Posted by cannon303

...Has anyone heard of what i said above?

I'm not sure if this is entirely relevant to your dilemma but I have experienced a situation where mail from a local government department was blocked by my client's ISP (Freedom-to-Surf) because locgovdept's mail server delivered mail via an intermediate service that was on a realtime blacklist used by F2S — I had to disable their spam filtering and employ other filtering methods locally on the client's server. Have you looked at this type of scenario?

In the case above I had to ask the locgovdept to forward affected mails (and their NDRs) to my own email address so I could identify what was happening. I'm sorry I no longer remember the details with any more accuracy as it was around 3 years ago!

P.S. I haven't heard of outbound spam filtering, rumours or otherwise — sorry!

[cannon303]

Ok I've taken out a ticket timestamp: 2007/11/29: 12:39:30 which includes the bounce back message that the local authority gets when they try and send an email to my client. P.S. I can't find anywhere that says what the ticket number is.

[cannon303]

ticket is #BLU-93028-946 or #EIL-71604-877 sorry seemed to have submitted it twice somehow. Anyway the error message is "Deferred: Name server: artlink.uk.net.: host name lookup failure" I've googled it and one suggestion is that it doesn't have a valid MX record, if this is the case how could i fix this?

[eUKhost.com]

Originally Posted by cannon303

Ok I've taken out a ticket timestamp: 2007/11/29: 12:39:30 which includes the bounce back message that the local authority gets when they try and send an email to my client. P.S. I can't find anywhere that says what the ticket number is.

Ticket number is received in subject field with the auto-responder notification sent to you once you submit ticket.

let me know if you can see the ticket number in subject field.

[cannon303]

ticket is #BLU-93028-946 or #EIL-71604-877 sorry seemed to have submitted it twice somehow.

[cannon303]

If i do need to enter valid MX records as suggested above, where would I do it? Is this something I need to do in cpanel or should I be entering it where I originally bought the domain name in the same way that I had to point to eukhost nameservers for hosting? If so what are the MX records?

[cannon303]

Ive looked in my cpanel and there seems to be an MX record set up priority 0 entry artlink.uk.net but when I look at the website where I bought domain from the MX records are blank. Should I put the same details in there??

[eUKhost.com]

Originally Posted by cannon303

ticket is #BLU-93028-946 or #EIL-71604-877 sorry seemed to have submitted it twice somehow.

Matthew has replied to your Ticket and he has requested sender details for him to check logs and figure out this problem.

[cannon303]

Originally Posted by 247h

I'm not sure if this is entirely relevant to your dilemma but I have experienced a situation where mail from a local government department was blocked by my client's ISP (Freedom-to-Surf) because locgovdept's mail server delivered mail via an intermediate service that was on a realtime blacklist used by F2S — I had to disable their spam filtering and employ other filtering methods locally on the client's server. Have you looked at this type of scenario?

In the case above I had to ask the locgovdept to forward affected mails (and their NDRs) to my own email address so I could identify what was happening. I'm sorry I no longer remember the details with any more accuracy as it was around 3 years ago!

P.S. I haven't heard of outbound spam filtering, rumours or otherwise — sorry!

Hi 247h thanks for your response. Eukhost tech support seem to say that it's a problem at the local authorities end and not with my client, so yes they are in some way filtering outward emails to my clients email. The bounce back that they get is "Deferred: Name server: artlink.uk.net.: host name lookup failure". Now i've googled this error and it could be down to incorrect mx records or no mx records. Ive looked in my cpanel and the mx record is set up, however I have the domain name registered elsewhere and in that control panel the mx records are left blank - do you think that I should put correct mx record in there as well or do you think it won't make any difference if i already have it set up in eukhost?

[eUKhost.com]

Originally Posted by cannon303

Hi 247h thanks for your response. Eukhost tech support seem to say that it's a problem at the local authorities end and not with my client, so yes they are in some way filtering outward emails to my clients email. The bounce back that they get is "Deferred: Name server: artlink.uk.net.: host name lookup failure". Now i've googled this error and it could be down to incorrect mx records or no mx records. Ive looked in my cpanel and the mx record is set up, however I have the domain name registered elsewhere and in that control panel the mx records are left blank - do you think that I should put correct mx record in there as well or do you think it won't make any difference if i already have it set up in eukhost?

As your DNS is controlled from another registrar so you will need to setup MX records from control panel provided by them. Zone file on our servers is of no use for your domain name is using our hosting service with remote DNS service.

[cannon303]

Hi thanks for your help. The problem is now sorted. At first the IT department at the hcc.gov.uk wouldn’t talk to me, saying "they don't take external enquiries" and adamantly sighting the problem at EUKhosts end. After shaking a few trees I managed to get them to look at it and they needed to put a route in to our IP address and now all works fine. My only worry is that they filtered out the IP address in the first place for security reasons meaning that IP address that we use for my clients site is in someway not a trusted zone. I wonder how many other organisations have implemented this "security" measure.

Thanks again for your help