[Mimedefang] Free Tool Ferrets Out Mail Server Problems

Gary Funck gary at intrepid.com
Wed Apr 12 20:16:57 EDT 2006



http://www.emailbattles.com/archive/battles/email_aaddbfghhe_ch/

Free Tool Ferrets Out Mail Server Problems
Posted on 04/05/2006 @ 15:11:25 in Email.

Trouble receiving mail? Installing a new mail server? Need to make sure all
your email servers are accessible?

Experienced network managers have long plodded through DNS queries, making
sure that MX records matched A records which matched IP addresses. Then they
checked SMTP ports to make sure the servers were open for business...

This can be a fairly time-consuming and error-prone process, especially if
you or your email vendor, sport 11 mail servers, like IBM... Or two MX
records that point to 15 hosts, like 3com.com... Or five MX records pointing
to 18 IP addresses, some of which are only for outbound email, like sun.com.
[...]

http://www.emailbattles.com/archive/battles/email_aaddhghiad_ih/

Why Yahoo Can't Deliver Email
Posted on 04/12/2006 @ 16:55:14 in Email.

Have you ever wondered why senders complain so much about Yahoo Mail's poor
delivery?

So did Email Battles.

Curious, we pointed our hot new diagnostic toy, Mail Server Profiler, at
Yahoo's mail servers, to see if we could find any hints.

First, Mail Server Profiler mapped and analyzed the Yahoo Mail setup. It
found 16 host IP addresses behind four mail server MX records, and
identified half of them as closed, ie, not accepting any email messages.

[...]

Next, we took measurements every two minutes for half an hour. That's 15
separate readings of each of 16 IP addresses, for a total of 240 readings.
The results were surprising.

During that period, Yahoo mail servers were willing to accept mail just 55%
of the time (133 "open" readings). Average availability for MX record groups
over the period ranged from as low as 25% to a high of just 75%.

[...]





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