Hotmail & Live@Edu blocking mail from Exchange Server 2003

[nsherin]

Hi all,

I've set up an Exchange 2003 server at home. I have a registered domain, which points to my static IP provided to me by BT Business (my ISP).

Reverse DNS is set up and appears to be working, as I can send/receive mail from GMail without any issues (something I couldn't do when I tried this sometime back and had not got BT to set up reverse DNS).

I can send mail from an account at Live@Edu (we are using this for our pupil e-mail, but I've also got my own account set up for testing purposes). However, mail that I send from my Exchange server back to the account at Live@Edu does not get delivered - be it a newly created mail messae or a reply. I suspect using Hotmail would yield the same results.

Any ideas would be much appreciated on how to sort this one! Thanks in advance!

[pete]

I'd bet that Hotmail are blocking mail from IPs within BT's broadband ranges. Including static IPs. Since most mailservers in those ranges will be compromised hosts (botnet-related) rather than legitimate mailservers, it's not surprising.

Otherwise, they're more picky than Gmail about your mailserver - have you run your mailserver through mxtoolbox.com to check it appears alright?

[nsherin]

Thanks Pete for the quick reply. I've just sent it through mxtooolbox.com and on the black list test, I get the following result:

Your ISP BT-UK-AS BTnet UK Regional network/AS2856 is UCEPROTECT-Level3 listed for hosting a total of 25886 abusers. See: Detail
Return codes were: 127.0.0.2

Any ideas how to get it 'un-blacklisted'? There is an article about BT here: UCEPROTECT®-Network - Spam Database Query

SMTP tests come back clean - i.e. it's not an open relay - thankfully!

MXToolbox.com has some nice tools - a very handy website to remember.

Thanks.

[tom_newton]

Use an upstream, authenticated smarthost. Generally sending mail from any IP block belonging to an ISP's consumer ranges is likely to result in being banned somewhere.

[pete]

Yeah, you can't get it unblacklisted - only BT can. Depends on who uses the blacklist and whether they care about impacting people running mailservers in their broadband ranges. Like tom says, I'd use a smarthost. A vps in a datacenter would suffice provide the hosting provider doesn't give rack space to spammers.

[tom_newton]

Or.... this may work... sign up to gmail, and then reg your domain email address with gmail, then use their smtp servers?