If you are a reseller as I am you probably spend a lot of time dealing with email problems. My clients seem to call me first whenever there is a problem. Don’t get me wrong on occasion there are problems on my server but that is usually not the case. Clients don’t have a clue how email works, they just want to push send and have it leave their machine. The complaints range from delays, undeliverable, can’t send, can’t receive, dropped attachments and on and on. I spend a lot of time analyzing email headers, consulting time zones, accounting for daylight saving time, anyway you get the picture. I continually have to educate my clients about disk quotas, it would be nice to be able to save all your emails on the server but you can’t. Then there is the throwing in the trash problem, it still uses disk space, you must empty the trash. I’m sure you can all relate!

I have now encountered a brand new problem, blocked IP addresses. Not for spam but for rejected emails. I have a client who had their default email address set to forward to their ISP assigned address. This one was setup so all email sent to the domain which included incorrectly addressed mail was being forwarded to the private address. Now this is where it gets interesting and I am not absolutely sure how the ISP decides which email to reject, it may be a user setting or some kind of global firewall. If the reject rate gets high enough the IP address of the email server gets flagged and they then stop all email being sent from the offending server. All emails originating from your server will be blocked from entering the ISPs domain. After a time the score gets reset and the process starts again, if the reject rate gets high enough the block will once again be deployed. Another thing I should mention is the use of verify call back, if your reseller uses this your email will not even leave your pop server because the verify call to the recipient domain will not be answered.

I am by no means an expert in any of this, like my clients I just want everything to work, unfortunately the spammers have added a new twist to email. Cpanel allows the client to control the delivery of improperly addresses emails to a default address, it might be time to take a look at this setting and take it out of the client’s hands. I hope my venting will help others who deal with similar issues, the next time one of your clients complains about delayed emails it might help in the search for the answer.

Cheers

Ron

Hi

I didn't quite understand what you were trying to get across, if the user has issues sending mail from the hosting companies SMTP server, if they try there own ISP's SMTP server this should work.

I am just whining in general about clients and their email problems.

I am just whining in general about clients and their email problems.

LOL - fair enough - email probably is the largest drain on support resources. Usually it is end user error and it is a challenge keeping up to snuff on all the various mail clients, ISP's, etc...

But, what can you do - email is still one of the major driving forces for this industry - so, best you can do is stock up on demo's from demodemo.com - get as much documentation together as possible explaining everything - and politely, after answering their support questions regarding email - guide them to your online resources explaining all of this. Eventually, your support load on email will go down