autoturn decommision and *.plus.com domains
Quote from: jch There isn't a way to redirect *all* <domain>.plus.com mail that I've missed is there?
No there isn't I'm afraid.
Quote from: coastergrotto I have just received Bob's email and I must admit I'm all at sea over it, particularly at the beginning where it says:
Quote You are receiving this email as our records indicate that you have your plus.com, force9.co.uk, free-online.co.uk and/or domain email delivered to you directly using SMTP.
As far as I can see my incoming mail server is POP3 mail.plus net. My outgoing mail (SMPT) is relay.plus net.
You have a .co.uk domain hosted against your account and somebody has added manual MX records to point your email to an SMTP relay service.
MX 1 smtp.secureserver.net.
MX 10 mailstore1.secureserver.net.
MX 20 mx.last.plus.net.
All that will happen when the platform is decommissioned is that you'll lose that mx.last.plus.net record (which considering the above shouldn't present any problems). Having said that, I'm a little concerned that you're using mail.plus.net to collect your messages. Is this *definitely* the case for your .co.uk domain because that's not the place your DNS entries point to?
Quote from: coastergrotto
All that will happen when the platform is decommissioned is that you'll lose that mx.last.plus.net record (which considering the above shouldn't present any problems). Having said that, I'm a little concerned that you're using mail.plus.net to collect your messages. Is this *definitely* the case for your .co.uk domain because that's not the place your DNS entries point to?
Bob:
I have checked my Outlook Express Accounts and it definitely says that my incoming mail POP3 is mail.plus.net. What are your recommendations as I'm lost when you say that's not the place your DNS entries point to.
I cannot believe that PLUSNET sent out this email today about the change. Do they really understand who their customers are? You have people who usually type in to MS Outlook or other client, the settings provided on the FAQ on the HELP Section. Can you imagine the majority of people 
, trying to understand the "Autoturn", the "MX", "Finger" aspects of what is being communicated.
This was obviously written by a technical person with absolutley no regard for who the audience is of the email. I can't imagine all the calls which will come in on the back of that email.....
Golden rule "Know your audience"
, trying to understand the "Autoturn", the "MX", "Finger" aspects of what is being communicated.This was obviously written by a technical person with absolutley no regard for who the audience is of the email. I can't imagine all the calls which will come in on the back of that email.....
Golden rule "Know your audience"
Quote from: Lorian This certainly doesn't just effect business customers. I'd like to say I'm very sorry that autoturn is going.
[snip]
If I have a powercut or my ADSL fails then I rely on autoturn to cache my inbound mail. I will investigate 3rd party solutions, but I suspect I won't like the cost.
I'm not sorry to see the back of autoturn: it always struck me as a hack in wait of a proper solution (either the normal periodic retry or triggered shortly after a connection comes back up). I am sorry to see the MX records go, but ...
MX records are a comparatively recent invention and the world managed without them for quite some time. They make life much easier when you're dealing with largish domains with only a small number of externally facing servers and, in those largish domains, allow mail to continue to flow even when one of those externally facing servers becomes unreachable.
The effect of losing the secondary MX records for the main.<domain>.plus.com domains has been overstated somewhat. I'm partly responsible for that and I apologise for making it look worse than it is.
I would be surprised if anyone actually notices.
There are three cases when having a secondary MX will allow the sending agent (usually, but not always, an MTA) to actually get the message closer to its domain:
- [hen the mail.<domain>.plus.com SMTP listener is not accepting mail
- When your broadband connection is down
- When plusnet's connectivity is restricted (I hesitate to say broken but I don't think it's ever been completely down).
The first two are currently taken care of by the secondary MX's pointing to plusnet's autoturn servers. When your connection recovers you need to arrange to have any pending mail delivered to you from those secondary MX servers. (Normally that would not be the case, the mail would eventually be retried). In the last case the mail will sit on the sending host waiting to be advanced a little further.
In the absence of the secondary MX records, one of two things will happen: the message will be queued on the sending host waiting to be delivered or the message will be rejected (and possibly discarded). It's that second possibility that causes people to worry.
Now, don't forget we're dealing with a rare event here. You have an SMTP listener because you are running a mail server, and I presume that if you're running a mail server, it's running all the time on your little, low power machine (you're not a business after all). If you're not connected (almost) all the time and running your SMTP listener (almost) all the time then you perhaps need to consider getting your own domain and using one of the free or cheap MX providers mentioned earlier: we're not talking about bank-breaking cost here, a domain can cost as little as £5 a year and has the added advantage that you're now portable and plusnet have to work to keep you
Back to that second possibility: messages will only be rejected or discarded if you're down long enough: several days. Anyone running a proper mail service will queue mail up for several days; anyone else is almost certainly a spammer.
If you're going away for a couple of weeks and you want to turn off your broadband and SMTP server and you were relying on the autoturn servers then actually things are really not much changed. The procedure is different: you switch your mail over to use POP for delivery and when you come back you run fetchmail to fetch it all and switch back to SMTP. You can do the same if your SMTP listener drops dead as well.
As I said, the effect of this change is really very small. I would be surprised if anyone saw any difference: apart from perhaps getting a little less spam.