Problems sending mails to AOL and similar

Published on August 8th, 2006 by DannyT. Filed under Business, Hosting

AOL, the wonderful company that they are, require any mail to be sent to them to be from a server with a valid reverse DNS lookup (ptr) record. If you’re finding emails bouncing back from AOL (and some others) make sure your mail server’s domain name server has an an appropriate ptr record setup.

This is actually a fairly resonable anti-spam measure, however try finding out from AOL that’s the problem isn’t so reasonable. Anyway posting this as we’ve had this issue a couple of times and would make for a good reference.

To check you have an appropriate reverse dns setup, goto www.dnsstuff.com and enter the IP of your mailserver into the 2nd field in the middle. at the bottom if you’re okay it should say:
Answer:

83.98.149.130 PTR record: mail.moov2.com. [TTL 172800s] [A=83.98.149.130]

if not you’ll get some message saying no reverse lookup or similar.

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About DannyT

The blog: danny-t.co.uk - General geek talk focusing on Rich Internet Applications, Microsoft and Adobe technologies and the web in general. The business: Moov2.com - RIA development agency Dan Thomas has been an Internet geek since circa 1994. He has been running Moov2 since 2003 and prior to that worked as a Flash developer for one of europes largest E-learning providers.

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