Hi, any advice on this is very welcome.

Recently my inbound mail has started to go missing. It is not all inbound mail but from certain senders, they are unable to successfully send me email. They are not receiving a bounce message from their SMTP server so assume that the message has been successfully delivered.

On my end I have raised a ticket with HMS support and notified them of the details of the lost email but there is no record of the email ever being received on the HMS mail server.

What makes this stranger is that I have asked the senders to cc my gmail account and the mail is successfully delivered.

I dont' know how to resolve this and my business depends on email this is very serious.

Thanks Steve

Hello,
are you using Postini? If so, Postini is most likely the cause of the problem. Postini sometimes trashes legitimate mail, and since the mail goes through Postini before HMS, the HMS mail servers may not receive it.

No I'm not using Postini. However I am using the spam filtering in SmarterMail but have added the email addresses to the Trusted Senders list. I am on a shared server I was wondering if another accounts Postini settings may be affecting my account.

Is there anyway to trace email through the system to track where it is getting lost?

Try turning off spam filters for a short time. If that does not work, I recommend getting a new mail system. What I mean by that is switching your MX records to Google Apps. You mentioned that you received the email fine on Gmail. Google apps can receive email under your domain name, and provides SMTP and POP service. Google Apps also has a lot faster delivery time, both sending and receiving than smartermail. Try it out. http://gooogle.com/a. Instruction steps are provided there..

Thanks for the help. I will turn my spam filter off for a while and see what happens but I have little faith in it working.

I'm not going to give up on HMS yet and go to Google, I just renewed for another year and hate to see that money and time go to waste.

When will the industry sit down and fix the email system - if we can get a man on the moon then surely we can build a reliable electronic postal system or do I have to go out and buy some carrier pigeons!

Steve

Stevie,
surely I wouldn't give up on HMS just since the email isn't working. The thing is, email is never perfect at any shared provider. I myself, a proud HMS client use Google Apps.

I have had a minor breakthrough. Looking at the header records of the emails that are getting lost, the IP range are all consistent:

mail36.syd.optusnet.com.au (mail36.syd.optusnet.com.au [211.29.133.76] mail33.syd.optusnet.com.au (mail33.syd.optusnet.com.au [211.29.132.104] randw1.nsw.optusnet.com.au [220.237.20.140]) mail36.syd.optusnet.com.au (mail36.syd.optusnet.com.au [211.29.133.76]) smtp.syd.people.net.au [218.214.225.98] by mail43.safesecureweb.com with SMTP
218.214.49.152 by smtp.syd.people.net.au with SMTP mail01.syd.optusnet.com.au (mail01.syd.optusnet.com.au [211.29.132.182]) mail23.syd.optusnet.com.au (mail23.syd.optusnet.com.au [211.29.133.164])

I have asked if HMS are blocking these but they deny it. HMS seem to be a little confused about their mail settings initially they told me they don't block IP addresses, then they came back and said they did. And it appears if the IP is blacklisted then the sending server is unable to connect and so no bounceback is sent so the mail gets lost in cyberspace. I don't even know if we can see what IP addresses are being blocked on our email server.

I have tried to contact Optusnet but I gave up after waiting in a phone queue for 30 minutes.

Still trying to get to the bottom of this one.

Steve

addressing spam problems and other shared hosting annoyances requires many changes in policy, so it is hard to keep track of them all. But I do believe that they block IPs now.

If we see a server flooding one of our servers we will blacklist the IP address. Basically we have limitations on how many SMTP sessions are allowed on the server. I believe the limit is 1000 and I have seen this limit been hit before. We will investigate it and block certain IP's that have 30 or so simultaneous connections. Usually its spamming one users catchall sending them thousands of spam emails. This is the only reason really that IP's become blocked, if we feel its causing poor server performance. I believe I had worked on your ticket, or at least have worked on a ticket when a technician said we did not block IP's when in fact we do in some cases, and I even had checked with our networking department to ensure that we didn't have anything blocking them from out network.

Unfortunately these situations are very difficult to troubleshoot. Naturally when they are able to send to services like GMail it makes it look like its something on our end. However this usually is not the case at all. I have worked with customers who were having trouble receiving emails from certain users, and then after about a month or two its discovered that the senders ISP are caching wrong DNS records and they are sending the mail to the wrong location. If the sender is an optusnet.com.au customer then I would suggest trying to get them to open the ticket with optusnet.com.au as they may have better luck. Once the dialog has begun we can definitely work with that ISP to try and diagnose the issue.

Was this issue ever resolved for you?

-Ray

We did finally reach a resolution to this. Thanks to HMS support.

It turns out that I still had an active email account with Optusnet. I cancelled that years ago but Optusnet had not correctly decommissioned the account and so we still delivering mail from the Optusnet network to my old email account. After contacting them and making sure that the account was decommissioned now all mail from their network is getting delivered correctly.

Thanks.

That would cause it...we have been guilty of not removing some domains in a timely fashion as well which makes it so that anyone on that shared server cannot email that domian and it gives a 'No Such User' if disabled or simply delivers it if its not disabled and leaving no trace. If you have any further problems let us know

-Ray