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BUG in forum mailserver


stoneracer

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Hi,

 

as my first post I've to report a bug with the mailserver which sends out the new email validation mail:

 

The validation email is sent out by the IP address 208.67.212.66 which has the hostname ips-208-67-212-66.ipslink.com as reversmapping:

 

~$ host 208.67.212.66

66.212.67.208.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ips-208-67-212-66.ipslink.com.

 

When trying to resolv ips-208-67-212-66.ipslink.com there is no forward mapping which points to 208.67.212.66:

 

~$ host ips-208-67-212-66.ipslink.com

Host ips-208-67-212-66.ipslink.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

 

This misconfiguration results in the rejection of the validation email by our mailserver so I had to temporary whitelist the IP to get the email.

More information regarding the requirement for a valid forward confirmed reverse DNS can be found e.g. at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-confirmed_reverse_DNS

 

Please fix this as it's very difficult to register a valid account with mailservers checking this requirement.

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Sorry, I don't get it. What should the PBX do? Perform a PTR lookup and then again a forward lookup of the DNS address? How would the mail server know about these steps? Is this a problem in the DNS config? The PBX has no control over the DNS server, it is just a DNS client (sorry if these questions seem to be stupid).

 

If you cant to control what the PBX sends in the EHLO message, there is a global setting "email_domain" (check your pbx.xml file). Maybe you want to change it to whatever the DNS name of the PBX is.

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Sorry, I don't get it. What should the PBX do?

 

we're not talking about the PBX ;-)

The bug report is about this forum, the topic of this category says: "Question About The Forum: If you have any problems with the forum please report them here." so I thought it should be in the right place.

If possible please ask the admin of the forum server for fixing the mailserver, if anything is still unclear feel free to ask :-)

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Hello.

 

Our forum is hosted on a Shared Server with other forums and not on our own 'private' server. On a Shared Server environment I'm afraid that's going to be the result. We cannot change the rDNS records to an individual site on a shared server. If we had our own dedicated server, that would be a non-issue.

 

This has come up before, and the problem is that the recipient email servers are set up "too strictly". There's unfortunately nothing we can do about that as we do not have input as to your setup. At the moment it appears the best 'workaround' for this is for you to 'white list' our forum permanently.

 

That is "by design", although I agree it's annoying. Everyone fights spam on a daily basis, and Hosts seem to get the short end of the stick when they try to reduce it by restricting emails in the manner above.

 

I hope this is helpful.

 

Best regards.

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Hello,

 

We cannot change the rDNS records to an individual site on a shared server. If we had our own dedicated server, that would be a non-issue.

it's not necessary to get an individual reverse DNS record, just simply a working one would be great. The IP 208.67.212.66 resolves to ips-208-67-212-66.ipslink.com, so it would be enough if there would a DNS record for ips-208-67-212-66.ipslink.com which points to 208.67.212.66.

 

This has come up before, and the problem is that the recipient email servers are set up "too strictly".

Well they are not setup "too strictly", forward confirmed DNS is a must have in many popular mail servers and also at most of the well known webmail hoster. I would understand if there's no revers mapping of the IP, but a IP which contains a PTR record must have the corresponding forward mapping to work correctly.

 

There's unfortunately nothing we can do about that as we do not have input as to your setup.

Why don't you change the configuration within the forum so that mails are sent out using a different mail server? Using a SMTP account on a well configured mail server should be very easy.

 

At the moment it appears the best 'workaround' for this is for you to 'white list' our forum permanently.

Sadly this is no option. Our company does not whitelist badly configured mail servers as the problem should be solved where it originates.

At the moment I simply can not receive any notification sent out by the forum.

 

Also I understand that it's not very important that I'm able to receive notifications of the forum, but I guess you'll have a lot of forum registrations which were not confirmed simply because the user is not able to receive the registration email.

 

Just keep in mind that many users neither won't search why they are not able to register nor they are able to change the mail server configuration to receive your mails. As a result of this they also can not complain because they are not able to post anything and the forum also does not list an email address for help inquiries.

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