Email Manual » MTA’s

Hotmail inbound email servers down.

EmailManual — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:26:29 +0000

Since around 11:30am GMT this morning hotmail has not been accepting any inbound email for hotmail.com, .co.uk live or msn domains.

When an SMTP server trys to make a connection to any of hotmail MX servers the connection is either accepted and then closed immediately or outright rejected.

There is nothing on the hotmail/Microsoft postmaster site to acknowledge the problem at this stage however it has been reported on twitter that it may be down for as long as 8 hours which allegedly came from a Microsoft technical support representative.

Mail server administrators should monitor outbound queue sizes and take measures to protect their email infrastructure in the event that their queues become too large/full.

If you have any further information on the issue please leave a comment so that it can be shared with other readers.

Yahoo.co.uk mail servers offline.

EmailManual — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:07:42 +0000

Yahoo’s mail servers which handle email for yahoo.co.uk (and possibly other EU domain suffixes) appear to have gone offline a couple of hours ago.

There is no word from yahoo! on the cause or whether the outage is planned or not but ESP’s and bulk mailers should be aware that you will likely build up large queues on your MTA’s and these should be monitored. This is not an issue with your deliverability but instead an outage.

The following servers are affected:

yahoo.co.uk. 449 IN MX 10 mx2.mail.eu.yahoo.com. – 77.238.177.142
yahoo.co.uk. 449 IN MX 10 mx1.mail.eu.yahoo.com. – 217.12.11.35

We will update this post again when the servers return.

Goodmail Adopts DKIM: Widening the range of supported MTA’s

EmailManual — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:02:48 +0000

Daniel Dreymann the co-founder of Goodmail, the company whose product range includes CertifiedEmail recently wrote on his personal blog that Goodmail are to adopt the use of DKIM as an authentication method rather than relying on a standard which goodmail themselves had designed and implemented involving RSA key pairs and SHA-1.

Daniel said:

“It was a relatively simple matter for us to substitute DKIM for our original authentication layer. The authentication layer was, and still is, a rather prosaic component of CertifiedEmail. The other security components, the “secret sauce” that made CertifiedEmail the best and the only secure email certification system, remain in place. DKIM-based CertifiedEmail is as secure as the original specification of CertifiedEmail.”

The benefit to marketers and IT staff here is that rather than having to run and maintain specialised MTA’s from vendors like Port25, Strongmail, Message systems and Socketlabs nearly all off the shelf mail servers will support DKIM signing on outbound messages. This allows organisations to use CertifiedEmail from Goodmail on your outbound corporate email as well as emails you send through your ESP (Email Service Provider).

If you wish to read more about this news please see the full press release here.