I registered a domain from an ISP/Hosting company, and leased a Virtual Private Server from them to operate my website.
AOL and other mailservers won't accept email from my website because it does not have Reverse Domain Name Server Lookup set up.
Everything I have read says this is the responsbility of the ISP that provided the IP addresses and Domain Name Servers.
The company says it is *my* responsibility, and I will have to dedicate two IP addresses and build this into my Virtual Private Server, and will have to upgrade to $160 month to handle the "extra load".
I say it is their responsibility to set up reverse DNS look up, given that they provide the DNS servers and the two IP addresses so that the internet community can translate my domain name into an IP address.
If you do a "Who Is?" lookup, it returns two nameservers operated by the ISP, and their dedicated IPs for them. I figure a reverse lookup should lead to their servers also.
Please help me sort this out. The first answer does not seem to help.
I have gone to www.dnsstuff.com, and there is NO reverse DNS look up registered. The people I lease my virtual server are providing the DNS servers, but they continue to claim that I have to configure my own DNS servers if I want reverse look up. They claim that the servers they are using as my Domain Servers do not provide the reverse look up function (they claim it is disabled). They claim I am the only client who is having this problem, and that it is either AOL's fault for insisting on reverse dns lookup before acceptine email, or it is responsibility to set up reverse dns lookup if I want it.
I am going nuts with this...how can they possibly be selling hosting packages and NOT provide reverse dns lookup???
How could any of the sites they host ever send anything to AOL? Surely AOL is not the only big server to reject mail coming from domains that cannot be looked up in reverse.
I do not know why they refuse to just do it. for me The responsibility falls on the owner of the IP address.
A lot of companies will provision lines from larger ISPs, and that is who ultimately owns the IP address. Contact the ISP and get rDNS setup and your e-mail woes will go away. A reverse DNS works just like DNS, just in reverse. When a mail server gets mail from your domain, it performs a reverse DNS to see if the mail server name matches the IP address. So just make you mail domain (i.e. mail.yourcompany.com) point back to the IP address of your mail server (either your WAN address if your nat'd or its external address if its 1-1 nat)
Go to www.dnsstuff.com to test if your reverse dns is setup right, good luck! Remember that your ISP may not be the ones that own the IP, they may have provisioned the service from a larger ISP, just do some digging and keep hounding them or else you'll never get anyone to accept your mail. Read the provider's fine prints. That should give you ideas what they can and can't do for you.
If it doesn't say they'll do reverse DNS for VPS users, then either do it yourself or find someone else who does. Not all providers are created equal, and whether the one in question will provide such or not is up to them based on their business models.
And some hosting providers don't exactly have the resources to keep checking for email delivery with various ISPs, especially when ISPs have their own policies on such. It takes time and money to be updated on each of their practices.
I once had my own email blocked by RoadRunner. I notified my host about it and gave them specifics based on RR, and the host contacted them.
Between the time I first reported it until my host replied my email was finally removed from RoadRunner's "black list" and allowed to go through, it took 12 days. Unacceptable maybe, but that's because no single party controls all factors involved in getting a technical function (like sending email) to process successfully without glitches.
You really won't know until you get there. |
