Email forwarded from Fasthosts being bounced

[#1]

It seems from a post on p.s.c-f that Plusnet are rejecting emails fowarded by cowboy untrustworthy outfits such as Just the Name.

Now who owns Just the Name...?

[#2]

I managed to open a ticket with PlusNet to raise this issue citing these forums for further details. They simply pointed me to these Forums for the answer to my question because one of their Product team leads has been contributing (Bob Pullen, I assume). This didn't really help!

I'm pretty sure I understand what the issue is now, but I really need a better solution that turning off the spam checker (which kind of has the opposite effect of what the change in policy was trying to achieve from my point of view!) or changing my domain host.

Bob, one of your earlier posts said you were still looking into this issue - is anything being done by PlusNet to find an acceptable solution?

[#3]

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@malvernnet wrote:
Bob, one of your earlier posts said you were still looking into this issue - is anything being done by PlusNet to find an acceptable solution?

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Yes, I've engaged the relevant teams, and suggested we re-approach the situation in a slightly different way. Any proposed change needs to follow a defined process though so I can't guarantee movement this week (although I'll push for it).

[#4]

Yes, I've engaged the relevant teams, and suggested we re-approach the situation in a slightly different way

With Mand's bat I hope

[#5]

My domain name is 'associated' with my PN account. Emails were being forwarded to the PN account from 123-reg. To overcome the current issue, I bypassed PN all together. Now I want to setup the MX records, for the domain, to point to PN servers so that mail will land at PN without having to be forwarded. The fact that the domain is associated with my PN account (i.e. for all intent and purposes, PN servers 'think' the domain is hosted here) and should deliver mail to my PN account. I have not been able to get this message across to the PN support team. Do I just point my domain MX record to relay.plus.net or are there any other designated servers?

Or am I going about it the wrong way all together? Hosting the domain with PN is not an option.

[#6]

I don't think you can do what you want without PN hosting the domain.

You should be able to host on Plusnet while leaving the registration at 123-reg.

[#7]

Jelv, thanks for your response which is more than what I am getting from PN. I raised a number of tickets on different accounts on Wed and there has been zero response from PN.

Regarding hosting a domain on PN / mail server is, technically, just configuring the relevant mail server(s) to 'say' that the domain is hosted locally. Then when messages 'land' on the server(s) in question, they will be delivered to the locally hosted account. Whether it gets there or how it gets there is down to the DNS and other mail relays and does not rely on changing the domain DNS servers to PN. You just need to route the mail to the respective servers. One way would be to simply point the domain MX records to PN servers.

I asked the PN support team as to which servers should I list in the MX records and they were clueless. Just restating incoming servers as mail.plus.net and outgoing as relay.plus.net. I suppose I could just set a single MX record to relay.plus.net.

I think I must have been pre-occupied over the last few years as I had not noticed how far the PN support has slipped. I guess its time to start looking for an alternative for all my accounts.

[#8]

Would you believe it, I've just had a response in the last 10 mins on one of my accounts.

This is for everyone who believes that turning off spam filtration will bypass SPF record validation - not so. Here is what PN support have to say:

Thanks for getting back to us. Ive tested your theory on spam filtering and as far as I can see regardless of wether spam filtering is on or off SPF validation is still processed. Here is a test directly to our inbound mail servers to your domain from a known domain that has SPF records.

printaply.co.uk. 10800 IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx ptr mx:mail.printaply.co.uk -all"

=== Trying avasin05.plus.net:25...
=== Connected to avasin05.plus.net.
<- 220 avasin05.plus.net Plusnet Cloudmark Gateway ESMTP server ready
-> EHLO mwheeler-linux
<- 250-avasin05.plus.net hello [84.93.217.1], pleased to meet you
<- 250-SIZE 104857600
<- 250-8BITMIME
<- 250 OK
-> MAIL FROM:<xx@xx.co.uk>
<** 550 SPF Validation Failed
-> QUIT
*** Remote host closed connection unexpectedly.

The implementation of SPF is being reviewed internally and a different approach is being discussed. Mail forwarding services are known to break SPF unless the forwarder supports SRS.

Moderator's note by Adie (Dvorak) removed personal email address

[#9]

All I can add is since I turned off Spam Filtration off many of the emails that were getting blocked are now getting through. So either PN don't understand what's going on or they must have changed something back!

[#10]

Interesting.

I switched spam filtering off, on Wednesday evening, and from yesterday morning I appear to be receiving all my emails.  This includes emails to a mailing list I subscribe to.  A friend of mine, who is subscribed to the same list and who, like me, has her domain hosted by Just the Name, with emails forwarded to Plusnet but who had not (at that point) switched off spam filtering was still not receiving mails to the mailing list.

This makes me somewhat sceptical about PN's statement that switching off spam filtering won't work.

She switched off spam filtering yesterday and I believe that this morning she was receiving emails from Amazon - I haven't heard yet whether her test message to the mailing list was successful though.

This suggests that 

[#11]

Oops, I'm not sure what happened there - the last para was meant to say something like:

This makes me somewhat sceptical about PN's statement that switching spam filtering off won't make any difference.

[#12]

Thanks for getting back to us. Ive tested your theory on spam filtering and as far as I can see regardless of wether spam filtering is on or off SPF validation is still processed. Here is a test directly to our inbound mail servers to your domain from a known domain that has SPF records.

printaply.co.uk. 10800 IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx ptr mx:mail.printaply.co.uk -all"

=== Trying avasin05.plus.net:25...
=== Connected to avasin05.plus.net.
<- 220 avasin05.plus.net Plusnet Cloudmark Gateway ESMTP server ready
-> EHLO mwheeler-linux
<- 250-avasin05.plus.net hello [84.93.217.1], pleased to meet you
<- 250-SIZE 104857600
<- 250-8BITMIME
<- 250 OK
-> MAIL FROM:<xx@xx.co.uk>
<** 550 SPF Validation Failed
-> QUIT
*** Remote host closed connection unexpectedly.

Well whatever account that was sent to didn't actually have SPAM detection turned off, it's MX record were still pointing at avasin.plus.net. See @bobpullens post in this thread https://community.plus.net/t5/Email/PlusNet-rejecting-some-email/td-p/1365820/page/2

The SPF checking is done by the mail MTAs at mx.avasin.plus.net. When you disable spam filtering your MX records start pointing to the MTAs at mx.core.plus.net instead. Disabling is not immediate though because it's a DNS change. You'll need to wait 24 hours or so.

From the sending address it looks like that test was possibly done by @MatthewWheeler , maybe he needs to go and have a word with Bob

Moderator's note by Adie (Dvorak) removed personal email address

[#13]

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eeiltd wrote:

Regarding hosting a domain on PN / mail server is, technically, just configuring the relevant mail server(s) to 'say' that the domain is hosted locally. Then when messages 'land' on the server(s) in question, they will be delivered to the locally hosted account. Whether it gets there or how it gets there is down to the DNS and other mail relays and does not rely on changing the domain DNS servers to PN. You just need to route the mail to the respective servers. One way would be to simply point the domain MX records to PN servers.

It's not as easy as that. As you've said the mail servers have to know which Plusnet account is to handle the emails coming in for the domain so that it can put them in the correct mailboxes. The mail servers are configured automatically from the account details so the only way of doing that is to host the domain on Plusnet (if it was done manually it would be lost again on the next refresh - this happens several times a day). Without that step the mail servers will not recognise the domain and bounce the emails coming in.

Once the domain is hosted by Plusnet you would be able to add other DNS entries (e.g. www) to point elsewhere - so why is having Plusnet do the hosting an issue?

The incoming mail server is mx.avasin.plus.net - but be warned, if you change your MX to point to that without having asked for the domain to be hosted first you will lose all your mail.

@bobpullen is the Plusnet mail expert - perhaps he could confirm the accuracy of this post.

[#14]

DNS propagation issues and whether the change has been published are best checked by doing a DNS lookup against the authoritative name server. E.g.

C:\Users\John>nslookup -type=mx accountname.plus.com ns1.force9.net
Server:  ns1.force9.net
Address:  195.166.128.16

accountname.plus.com  MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = mx.avasin.plus.net

[#15]

It would seem that I too am suffering this problem (in this case the domain registration is held by Zen and theire email servers are trying to forward my emails to my user@account.plus.com mailbox.

Is there any way in which I can get the Plusnet mail servers to process mail for user@mydomain.co.uk (IOW cut out the forwarding from the process).  I don't need anything more than the mailboxes to be hosted.

Dave