Can't Send e-mail from Home to Work

[Barnacle]

I'm getting this message returned to me when I try to send an e-mail to myself from home to my company e-mail account. We are using Windows 2000 server with Exchange 5.5.

I tried to send from my Hotmail account and got a similar message.

Where should I start to look for the problem on our server?

--------------------------------------------------------

Reporting-MTA: dns; comcast.net
Arrival-Date: 27 Aug 2003 2:27:45 +0000

Final-Recipient: rfc822; <myname@mycompany.com>
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.2 MAIL FROM: <myemail@comcast.net> 512 REPLY: DNS reply: HOST NOT FOUND
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; Permanent Failure: Bad destination system address
Last-Attempt-Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 02:27:45 -0000

 

[smah]

&quot;DNS reply: HOST NOT FOUND&quot;

Sounds like no DNS record are pointing to your work mail server. This is rather odd, because I assume that at work, you can get mail from others outside the company.

Do a DNS lookup on your domain name. See if an MX record is found here

http://www.zoneedit.com/lookup.html

 

[jpm121]

Just out of curiosity...

At home:

Is your &quot;outgoing mail server&quot; set to smtp.comcast.net or to your work exchange server?

You should be relaying through the comcast SMTP server.

 

[Barnacle]

An MX record is found. When I try to lookup the A record by itself (in the link you provided) I don't get one. It says &quot;no A records found&quot;

Here is what I get for the MX lookup:
DNS Lookup Results
Host Type Value
companyname.com MX 20 mail.harddrivesinc.com
companyname.com NS littleboyblue.teckman.com
server.isp.com A xxx.xx.xx.159

When I do a ping of mail.companyname.com I get a return address of xxx.xx.xx.158. Shouldn't this ip match the A record?

 

[Barnacle]

Yes, my outgoing mail server is set to smtp.comcast.net for my comcast account in outlook express at home.

 

[jpm121]

Barnacle, I don't know if you're giving bogus server names there, but things are very funky.

Try running your addresses through

http://www.dnsreports.com

and see if you get any clues. Or, if mail.harddrivesinc.com is really the name of your mail server, you have some serious DNS issues to contend with.

 

[Barnacle]

I don't see where to enter my addresses on that site?

 

[jpm121]

Sorry man, typo on my part -- drop the S from report

http://www.dnsreport.com

 

[Barnacle]

OK. Thanks! Here are the responses I'm getting:

DNS Report
ERROR: Timed out getting NS data from parent server


Mail Report:
Getting MX record for companyname.com... Got it!

Host Preference IP(s) [Country] mail.companyname.com. 20 [No IP found]

Where do I go from here?

 

[Barnacle]

I spoke with the ISP and they are trying to telnet into mail.companyname.com 25 and are getting the following:

220 *************************************************************2******200*****
***00 *0*00

What does that mean? There is no firewall or filtering going on...

 

[Barnacle]

The ISP had our records listed incorrectly. They had made some server changes and messed up the addresses.

We're still not working even though they made the changes about 20 hours ago!

I am getting a message in the Event Log that says &quot;An attempt to connect to host xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (our external ip mail address&quot; failed. I can ping that ip address but I can't ping mail.companyname.com from within the company.

What should I do?

 

[jpm121]

Depending on what your DNS record TTL setting was, it can take up to 5 days to propagate to the rest of the net (theoretically more, but 5 days is pretty much &quot;standard&quot; for cache settings.)

If you can ping the server by IP address, perhaps your internal DNS needs to be tweaked or reloaded? It may be caching as well.