I configured my home server to use that machine as its smarthost rather than Comcast's server. Then, I moved my DNS pointers to point to that machine and had it forward incoming messages through the VPN. I created a VPN tunnel from my home machine to one of my servers on the open Internet. I could have spent an extra $20 a month and gotten a business account with Comcast, which I eventually did, but I didn't at first. So, I decided to take the inexpensive way out. I'm speculating that the ones not delivered were going through servers that did sending address verification, and as they couldn't connect back to my mail server to validate my e-mail address, they refused delivery. Some of our messages were being delivered, and some weren't. But, with the new firewall policy, something broke. Of course, I wasn't informed of the change, because I don't use Comcast's e-mail system! Previously, we would send e-mail from our workstations, and our mail server would forward the message through Comcast's smarthost incoming messages came directly to our server. So, Houston, we had a problem.Īfter several years of running my own mail server on my home machine connected to the Internet via Comcast, Comcast decided to implement a new firewall policy and started blocking incoming SMTP (tcp/25) connections on its residential users' networks. Of course, by this time, even I had noticed that the volume of incoming spam had gone down to none. Crap! There were 55 messages in the queue waiting to be delivered. Then, just to demonstrate to her that the mail server was healthy, I asked the server to print out its mail queue. I sent a quick e-mail to a friend of mine, got a response, and informed my wife that “it worked for me,” and chalked it up to her friend not being responsive. It all began when my wife started complaining that something was wrong with the e-mail system because she'd not heard back from a friend whom she had sent a message the previous day. In our case, two situations were conspiring against us: a change in Comcast's firewall policy and a change in Yahoo's mail delivery policy. A few days later, we'd get a phone call from the person asking whether we ever were going to respond. We'd receive a message asking a question, and we'd reply to the sender thinking nothing of it. The sad part was that we didn't know the messages weren't being delivered. Have you ever felt like you were being ignored? Have you ever felt like you were talking but no one was listening? Well, that's how it feels when your e-mail system is broken and you don't know it.ĭuring the past week, I've had a couple system problems that prevented people from receiving e-mail messages that my wife or I sent.
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