Miquel van Smoorenburg(miquels@cistron.nl)@2003.01.28 11:49:16 +0000:
I found out that our outgoing SMTP servers have been blocked by the msn.com MXes. In a nasty way, too -- no SMTP error, the TCP connection is simply closed by them immidiately after establishing it. We're not listed on any RBL/DNSBL and have an active abuse desk.
Miquel, does this problem still endure? I had such a thing quite a while ago (mid-2002) with them, but apparently it was a temporary problem of their MX in servers. I am also not listed in RBLs (due to pretty restrictive relaying policy) and the like, I was also _not_ able to reach someone at their end (postmaster@msn.com). After several hours of closed sockets, everything just worked again. Right now, our mail to msn.com goes via smtp-gw-4.msn.com(207.46.181.13) which appears to work: 220 cpimssmtpa19.msn.com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 5.0.2195.4905 ready at Tue, 28 Jan 2003 06:09:46 -0800 Apparently their service runs on some successor of Win2000, so I wouldn't be very surprised, if it turned out to be resource shortage on their end (WRT things like The Worm Of The Week[tm] and the like). A misconfigured proxy or load balancing device might be another option. Also, their clock is off by approx. five minutes. Their system apparently lacks NTP support, or the clocks in Redmond are 5 minutes behind the rest of the world... :-> Oh no - not-so-funny - they got different clock drift for every machine (cpimssmtpa[01..40].msn.com) that happens to pop up when connecting to their best preference MX. Looks like they DNS-loadbalance their loadbalancers for SMTP, too. Funny. Regards, /k[Ok-I-am-silent-now]arsten --
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