Can't Receive Any Mail 2

[jcbain]

Hello guys, I hope someone can help me as I have been unable to find any info about this problem. We have an exchange 2003 server and as of this morning we have been unable to receive any emails from anyone external. We can send emails out and persons get them, but when they send to us we don't get them. We can send and receive internally though.

Does anyone know what could be causing this or have a fix for it? Thanks...

 

[jcbain]

I got this error from dnsstuff.com

NS FAIL NS A timeout occurred getting the NS records from your nameservers! None of your nameservers responded fast enough. They are probably down or unreachable. I can't continue since your nameservers aren't responding. If you have a Watchguard Firebox, it's due to a bug in their DNS Proxy, which must be disabled (31 Jul 2006 UPDATE: several years after being informed of this, there is a rumor that there is a fix that allows the Watchguard DNS proxy to work).


I don't have a watchguard firebox, so if anyone can offer a suggestion that would be great, thanks...

 

[RichardHuang]

You can go to

http://www.dnsstuff.com/

and test your email settings (at lower right part of the homepage). It could be DNS settings or your firewall settings.

 

[jcbain]

No one touches the settings on the firewall, it stopped working around 7 this morning, when no one was here yet.

This is the error from DNS Stuff:


Getting MX record for mail.companyname.com (from local DNS server, may be cached)... Received a SERVER FAILURE response.

This should be treated as an ERROR (per RFC974), and the E-mail delivery should PROBABLY be retried later.


I don't know what the error means though, is this a problem with my ISP?

 

[RichardHuang]

Yes, you should contact your ISP or the company who hosts your DNS settings ASAP. I tried my company domain (mycompany.com) in dnsdtuff and got the following:

Getting MX record for ****.com (from local DNS server, may be cached)... Got it!.........

 

[jcbain]

Richard the company name isn't actually mycompany I just put that in there instead of the real name, but thanks you were right about me contacting my ISP.

The problem I think is because the bill is unpaid so they ISP started to disrupt certain services instead of turning it everything off. At least that's what they told me.

Thank you everyone for the responses.

 

[jcbain]

This is the nslookup response I am getting. CableBahamas is my ISP. They say it is a problem with my server. What is this response saying? Does it look like from this response, me or the ISP?

C:\>nslookup -q=mx mail.???.com
Server: ns3.cablebahamas.net
Address: 24.244.144.202

DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to ns3.cablebahamas.net timed-out

Is it their server causing the problem? Thanks again...

 

[58sniper]

You're not telling us anything. If dnsstuff.com is saying the NS is not reachable for your domain, I'd assume that's the problem and talk to whomever your NS provider is.

Since you don't tell us what the domain name is, that's as far as we're able to help.

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Microsoft Exchange MVP
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

 

[jcbain]

Thank you sniper for your response , the domain is abacomarkets.com

 

[58sniper]

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/lookup.ch?&name=abacomarkets.com&type=MX

Looks like your DNS is hosed. It's stuck in a loop. I'd check with no-ip.com. Something just ain't right.

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Microsoft Exchange MVP
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

 

[RichardHuang]

I telnet to mail1.abacomarkets.com 25 and the server is responding. It doesn't look like the DNS issue. It could be firewall or the server settings. The following was what I got from your server:
>telnet mail1.abacomarkets.com 25
....
>helo
>501 helo requires domain address

You can continue to do the rest of the test by following

http://email.about.com/cs/standards/a/smtp.htm

 

[58sniper]

DNS is clearly mangled. I don't care if the server is responding or not. If you can't get an MX lookup successfully, there is a DNS problem. And THAT will certainly impact email delivery.

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Microsoft Exchange MVP
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt