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From: Keith Wright <kwright@keithdiane.us>
From: Andy Stewart <andystewart@comcast.net>
In my town, I've noticed that other town employees with whom I send email are unable to send return email to me. This started happening about a month ago. My ISP is Comcast. ... C:> $ telnet 216.148.227.126 smtp C:> Trying 216.148.227.126... C:> Connected to gateway-r.comcast.net (216.148.227.126). C:> Escape character is '^]'. C:> 220 rwcrmxc18.comcast.net - Maillennium ESMTP/MULTIBOX rwcrmxc18 #337 C:> helo dsl.keithdiane.us C:> 250 rwcrmxc18.comcast.net C:> MAIL FROM: <kwright@keithdiane.us> C:> 250 ok C:> RCPT TO: <andystewart@comcast.net> C:> 250 ok C:> DATA C:> 354 ok C:> This is just kwright goofing on you. C:> Read your WLUG messages I will explain. C:> . C:> 250 ok . id=20060425052454r1800cg1fje [f] C:> QUIT C:> Connection closed by foreign host.
It seemed to work, and I am typing this on a machine behind an NAT translation firewall (other kinds should be transparent). This is not my mail server, but it seemed to work. Only Andy can say whether they accepted the message and then trashed it in flagrant violation of RFC-2821, which tells how to do such things.
Andy never said whether he got that message. You should have seen a two line message from me with almost no headers. If you got the message then I suspect that the problem with the town is not the firewall, but the reverse DNS. Could you post the domain name of the town? I would like to poke at its MX and PTR records to see if there is anything that I might feel like rejecting. Speaking of rejecting, when the town can not send mail to you do they get a bounce message with a reason for non-delivery, or does it just go into a black hole, looking like it was delivered but never showing up? -- Keith