ask dr lj: exim settings

[kirkcudbright]

I recently moved psgd.org to a hosting service (hawkhost.com), and started bouncing mail from *.andor.org and lists.arisia.org (maybe others, but these are the ones that have been reported to me). It seems that part of hawkhost's spam control is "sender verification". They originally told me it was "sender verification callouts", which is where the receiving SMTP server opens a connection to the sending SMTP server, to verify that it can receive mail for the sender's address. Then they told me that no, they're just checking that the sender's MX matches the source address of the connection (they didn't say that in so many words, I'm just guessing from the sort of comments they made). In the failing cases, there aren't MX records; as you know, RFC 5321 says that if there isn't an MX record, the sender falls back to using the A record. This goes all the way back to RFC 974, in the early days of DNS. So they're doing something non-compliant.

As an addendum, they just added whitelist entries for specific IP addresses, so I can receive mail from loud.andor.org, but I still can't send mail to it.

Here's the problem: I can argue from a standards perspective and a user perspective that what they're doing is broken. But I'd really like to talk to them in their language; there's some server setting that controls this, but I've never touched exim configuration before, and there's a daunting amount of documentation. Does this look familiar to anyone? From a skim of the docs, it looks like maybe dnslookup is configured with "mx_domains=*".

More to the point, I guess, are there any authorities I can point them at on How Not To Be Stupid With Exim? Or should I just give up on these guys?

Comments

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

If you need to be telling them how to configure their mailers, you may not want to use them as an ISP.

[kirkcudbright.livejournal.com]

That's the conclusion I came to. Last night I switched over to 3ixs (http://www.3ix.org/one_dollar_web_hosting.php). It's insanely cheap, and so far they don't seem to be butt-heads, at least in this way.