Re: Tracing emails from outside clients

maitakeboy <maitakeboy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thanks for your reply, Lanwench!

Earthlink hosts my DNS (sorry for not being precise in my original
post) mainly because of inertia: they were our original ISP and
website hosts, and though I've changed both of those I've never moved
the DNS out of an abundance of fear and caution. I got burned by a
bad replication of DNS when I changed public IPs several years ago.
If ISPs are not good DNS hosts, what do you consider to be the
optimal choice for hosting DNS records?

I personally like www.dyndns.com.
You would preconfigure the zone so that when you change nameservers it's
transparent.

The secondary server arrangement is just a legacy thing. I kind of
like it as an emergency backup.I have configured the manual forward
on it.

Ask Earthlink what it's actually doing with the mail. I would get rid of
that.

As far as looking at queues, I didn't think there were any incoming
queues anymore on Exchange 2003. Just outgoing.

I misspoke - try connections, But I don't think you'll see anything.

These senders can sporadically connect. If it were just a traffic
issue, then I would expect there to be a completely random
distribution of emails coming into the secondary server. But the same
external senders show up repeatedly, sending to the same users, which
I guess is the main clue that it's DNS on their side?

It could be, but removing the extra MX records (which you do not need) would
probably fix everything right up :)

Thanks again for your help.

"Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]" wrote:

maitakeboy <maitakeboy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have a somewhat unique problem. I host my own mail server, an
Exchange 2003 with a Barracuda 300 spam and virus firewall sitting
in front of it.

My MX record is hosted by Earthlink, our ISP

Actually, correction: your DNS is hosted with them - and I would
strongly suggest moving away from them. They are not known to be
very good DNS
hosts - ISPs generally aren't. And their support is dreadful.

. hey attach secondary
mail servers which they host, to our MX record

Sorry to be pedantic again, but you mean that your domain has
multiple MX records and theirs are higher-cost / lower preference MX
records which go to backup servers. I'm actually puzzled by this
because I thought Earthlink stopped doing "store and forward" for
people a long time ago. What's the reason you have this
configuration?

. I get about 10 - 12
emails a day which get shunted to that secondary server which is
then automatically forwarded to me as the network admin.

By what means?

Most, but not all
of the messages sent to the secondary server, seem to be from 3 or 4
clients, for 3 or 4 of my users, which leads me to believe there is
some configuration issue, not simply a traffic issue. I'm having a
hard time diagnosing what's going on, since there are no "failures"
as far as the sending server is concerned. It just makes a
connection wiht the secondary server. Is it possible to trace this
problem any other way than disabling the secondary servers?

Not really, unless you're sitting in front of the senders' servers.
Simplest to change your MX records - especially as I wouldn't
recommend sticking with this configuration (nd especially with this
host). If it's for backup purposes, note that your senders' servers
will retry delivery for several days if your server is unavailable.

Would real-time
tracking of some sort show why the connection to the main server is
failing?

Your firewall logs might show them trying to connect, I guess.

Is ther real-time tracking available with Exchange?

No, but you can look in your queues.

Does
Message tracking show attempts to connect to the primary MX record,
before connecting to the secondary MX record? I had this problem
before the barracuda, btw. I had SAVMSE.

Nope.


Thanks for any help on this.

Have these senders ever been able tp semd to your users?



.

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