KB05103101 Sending mail to large mailhosts

AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo etc may reject, or silently refuse messages sent to their users. Mail rejection and acceptance is always a matter of policy for recipient organizations, and there is nothing inherently wrong with either their approach, or probably, your settings.

There are two solutions if large mailhosts are rejecting your mail:

Method 1)

Ensure you have a correctly setup reverse DNS / PTR record set up, confirming the association between your IP address and your domain name. This is done by the organization that provided you with your IP address - usually your ISP or Telco  

AND

you have a prior arrangement with them - see, for example

AOL - http://postmaster.info.aol.com/
Hotmail - http://postmaster.msn.com/Guidelines.aspx
Yahoo - http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/abuse/index.html

This Forum thread is also helpful: read more ...

Method 2)

Alternatively, you can send email to your ISP's SMTP server (they will have already followed the procedure outlined above).

You can send all your mail to your ISP (ie not just the mail destined for AOL, etc). To do this, in the Mailtraq Console, Options | Outgoing Mail, enter the name of your ISP's smarthost. See here.

or

You can send just the mail for AOL, etc via your ISP, and send the rest directly.
To do this then you need to set up a custom route in Options | Outgoing Mail. See here for an example.

Updated 1 May 2007