Why is my (and my friend's) server dropping emails?

February 1, 2010 4:52 AM

Why is my (and my friend's) server dropping emails? A friend and I run small businesses in Hong Kong. I'm using a well-known hosting company in Florida, he's with a big U.S. registrar that offers hosting. Both of us have been losing emails from clients in Hong Kong, other parts of Asia and the U.S., including messages from people on our white lists and who we've received messages from before. We've asked our respective hosting companies, but they haven't been able to explain this, and I haven't seen any black helicopters recently. Does the great hive mind have any suggestions for fixing this? For bonus points, would moving our email accounts to Google apps help?
posted by quidividi to Technology (3 answers total)

Can they send to your gmail accounts (or other accounts not on your servers) without issue? Can you send to them with no problem? If your hosting company isn't seeing the emails come in and the senders aren't getting errors, they are being dropped anywhere in between, obviously. Perhaps a spam filter somewhere was recently changed to block sending to .cn addresses (assuming that's what you have)? I'm not sure how the Great Firewall works, so anything could be going on as far as I can tell.

You could try tracert'ing from a sender's network to see if someone is blocking somewhere?
posted by dozo at 6:41 AM on February 1, 2010

Tech support at your hosting company may not know what the postmaster does to fight/filter spam, so you might want to talk to the postmaster directly. Some mail servers filter out all mail from certain Asian countries because so much of it is spam. I co-administer a tiny private mail server with my husband and we ended up having to block all mail from mainland Chinese (.cn) domains and Korean domains because the odds of our 5 friends who had mail addresses with us getting mail from those countries was infinitesimal compared to the amount of spam we were getting. It was a big enough problem than when one of our friends who had a bigfoot (remember them!) alias found out bigfoot had moved to Korea, we told her that she was going to have to move to get her email.
posted by immlass at 7:08 AM on February 1, 2010

Are the missing emails ones that contain attachments of Word/Excel 2007 documents? There is an issue with certain mail servers that if the document had been saved as a previous version from Office 2007, when you attach it to an email, it makes the entire email disappear.

We struggled with that here in our office for awhile. I'm not sure if there was ever a solution other than instructing everyone that they had to save their documents as the most recent (2007) version.
posted by Eicats at 8:26 AM on February 1, 2010