smart server relaying feature

[bench]

It seems certain server like aol and hotmail are quickly to put you on the blacklist if they see lots of traffic to their free e-mail accounts.

We are now having problems sending e-mail to hotmail and aol e-mail accounts, however, we can receive mail from them.

I have contacted our ISP and they told us that is probable that hotmail and aol has put our domain IP in their blacklist. We get a winsock error or connection refused.

Our ISP has advised us to relay outgoing hotmail/aol e-mail to them for delivery. We need to find a way to tell wingate e-mail server that all outgoing e-mail going to either hotmail or aol to send it to our ISP for delivery. I have been looking but can't figure out how to do it.

Our ISP has provided us with an account to use for authentication. Any help on setting this up would be appreciated.

[adrien]

Hi

There are several options.

1. Turn delivery mode in WinGate to "use gateway for undeliverable mail". Then configure your ISP's mailserver as your gateway.

2. Add a domain called hotmail.com, set it up that mailboxes are hosted on another server, specify your ISP's server. This may make you a relay for hotmail.com though, which you probably don't want (not sure about this one, need to check the code).

3. Add a specific server entry for each of hotmail's MX servers. Unfortunately we don't have this configurable per domain yet, just per server. There are 4 for hotmail, and since they all have the same priority, you will need to add an entry for each. These are:

mx1.hotmail.com
mx2.hotmail.com
mx3.hotmail.com
mx4.hotmail.com

Select "server requires authentication", and enter the username and password of your ISP's mail server.

Then you need to add entries to your hosts file on the WinGate machine for mx1, mx2, mx3, and mx4.hotmail.com, specifying the IP address of your ISP's mail server.

then when WinGate thinks it is connecting to hotmails servers to deliver mail, it will actually connect to your ISP's one, and use the credentials you supply.

This has the advantages of:

a) doesn't make you an open relay for hotmail.com, since hotmail.com isn't considered a local domain.
b) doesn't wait until delivery fails before sending - so best performance.

You may need to keep an eye on whether your ISP changes the IP of their mail server, or if hotmail changes its MX records.

you could try option 2 first, since it is the easiest and will get the mail going to the right place, just not sure about the open relay aspect.

Hope this helps.

Adrien