technical failure of notification emails

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05-04-2015, 01:42 AM

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technical failure of notification emails

The real underlying reason for the failure of email notifications is
the misconfiguration of at least one factor in the email chain
by the sytems admins of internetbrands.com

One example:

one of the outbound email servers at internetbrands used for outbound
email is mxout4.internetbrands.com

a sane email server run by admins who care about reducing spam will
check the purported identity of the sending server as announced in
the HELO command

one of the simplest tests is to check for the existence of the purported
hostname as a A record

in this case, mxout4.internetbrands.com

there is no A record for mxout4.internetbrands.com

this is lameness of the highest degree

log snippet:

Code:

Fri 2015-05-01 02:37:39: <-- HELO mxout4.internetbrands.com
Fri 2015-05-01 02:37:39: Performing lookup on mxout4.internetbrands.com (looking for 98.158.192.75)
Fri 2015-05-01 02:37:39: Name server reports domain name unknown
Fri 2015-05-01 02:37:39: --> 451 ambiguous
Fri 2015-05-01 02:37:39:  64 bytes transferred

the internetbrands mail admin should have been examining their own
logs for high bounce rates, and would have realised that they have
a configuration problem

++

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