Re: Best Outgoing Mail, Via DNS or ISP SMTP?

Lanwench [MVP - Exchange] wrote:
In news:4D2EA0C5-D1BD-4BD4-A46D-739AD9C4C59C@xxxxxxxxxxxxx,
Daren <Daren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> typed:
I use the POP Manager to receive mail as my ISP (BT) scans everything
for viruses, so I get a nice big fat comfort zone.

Except for the lack of comfort inherent in forcing a mail server to act like a POP client :-)

But which is best... To send mail via the ISP or via DNS and if the
answer is DNS can anybody tell me why?

Regards

Daren

It's always best to send out directly if you have the bandwith, if you have a static IP address, and a PTR. It's often faster, it is easier to track mail/trace stuff, etc.

I'd put this one as the main advantage. When you send your mail off
through a smarthost, it's gone down a black hole. There's no way to
tell what happened to it, as even the best ISPs don't usually have
the time to snip out bits of their log files and send them to you.
If you do it yourself, you can see the handshake with the other
server, and if there are problems, you don't have to guess why.

A while back, I was trying to track down a complete lack of incoming
email. The company leased a domain name through an American company
and nothing was coming from them. They had no way to trace this further,
being unable to send email outside to one of their own addresses
without significant fiddling, so I connected to my home server and sent
them an email, and then studied my logs. There was no answer at all from
the redirection company, so there was obviously trouble there. 'I wonder
if they're in Florida,' I joked. A quick look at their website showed
that was exactly where they were...

A smarthost would just have sat on the test email, kept retrying at
intervals and after a day or two would have sent back a message saying
the email couldn't be delivered, but probably no details as to why. My
own mail server would have done that, but I had access to its logs.
.

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