The message I sent from my hotmail account bounced as well. But the bounced message I saw did not list a reason for the rejection only "Delivery to the following recipients failed" followed by the address to which I had sent the message.
With the default Hotmail account settings, you won't see the reason the mesage bounced listed. To see the reason for the message rejection, you have to take the following steps while logged into your Hotmail account.
You should now see something akin to the following in the message.
Final-Recipient: rfc822;test12345@moonpoint.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.7.1
Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550 5.7.1 <test12345@moonpoint.com>... Mail from 65.54.186.64 refused - see http://www.dnsbl.us.sorbs.net/
Look for the "Status" and "Diagnostic-Code" values to determine why the message was rejected. In this case, I see the message was rejected by SORBS, a blocklist I use on the system to cut down on the amount of spam reaching users of the system. I have the following line in the /etc/sendmail.mc file on the system, which results in sendmail querying the SORBS blocklist each time a message arrives on the system.
FEATURE(`dnsbl', `dnsbl.sorbs.net', `"550 Mail from " $`'&{client_addr} " refused - see http://www.dnsbl.us.sorbs.net/"')dnl
If the IP address of the system attempting to send the email is
listed in the SORBS blocklist, then the mesage is rejected with the message
Mail from xx.xx.xx.xx refused - see http://www.dnsbl.us.sorbs.net/
with xx.xx.xx.xx being the IP address of the sending system.
I looked up the IP address of the sending hotmail.com server, which in this case was 65.54.186.64. The SORBS system reported the following for that IP address.
| Address: | 65.54.186.64 |
| Record Created: | Thu Oct 6 23:58:40 2005 GMT |
| Record Updated: | Sat Feb 4 02:39:46 2006 GMT |
| Additional Information: | Received: from hotmail.com (bay16-f14.bay16.hotmail.com [65.54.186.64]) by desperado.sorbs.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id E9BF611436 for <[email]>; Sat, 4 Feb 2006 12:39:41 +1000 (EST) |
| Currently active and flagged to be published in DNS | |
| If you wish to request a delisting please do so through the Support System. | |
I tried sending another message to myself from the Hotmail account a couple of hours later. It too was rejected because it was on the SORBS list, but the address of the Hotmail email server the second time was 65.54.186.58.
I didn't want to stop using the SORBS list, but I also didn't want to make it impossible for any user on the system to receive email from a hotmail.com address.
An alternative is to continue to use the SORBS blacklist, but to "whitelist" specific hotmail.com and msn.com email addresses. Email sent from msn.com addresses will also come to your server from hotmail.com servers.
If you are using sendmail to process
incoming email, you can specify email addresses from which you will accept
email that would otherwise be rejected by listing the sender in
/etc/mail/access. You can add a line like the following to
that file. Use tabs (as many as you wish) and not spaces when separating
the address and the "OK".
moonpoint12345@hotmail.com OK
The line above specifies that any email from moonpoint12345@hotmail.com will be accepted. If a message originates from that address, then the system won't check the IP address of the sending server in blocklists used by the system. If you wish to add a comment to the file regarding any address you are adding, simply start a line with the "#" symbol and put any comment you want after it on the line.
After you add an address to /etc/mail/access, you will need
to regenerate the access.db file, presuming that you have specified that you
are using that type of database in /etc/sendmail.mc, which is normally the
default for Linux systems. If it is the case, you will have a line similar to
the following in your sendmail.mc file.
FEATURE(`access_db',`hash -T
makemap hash /etc/mail/access </etc/mail/access
Once you have run the makemap command, then anyone with a hotmail.com address that you have added to the access file should be able to send email to users on the system.
Note, you may also need to have delay_checks specified in
sendmail.mc to delay checking the blocklists until after other checks
have been made to determine whether the message should be accepted.
I also have the following line in
/etc/mail/sendmail.mc before the spot where I do the blocklist
checks, so that the normal blocklist checks won't be done in all cases, e.g.
when the sender has authenticated, etc. Note, if you modify sendmail.mc,
you will need to regenerate sendmail.cf from it using
m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf and then
restart sendmail with /etc/init.d/sendmail restart.
FEATURE(delay_checks)dnl
After I had added my hotmail.com address to the file and run makemap, I sent another message to myself from the hotmail.com account. This time it got through. The address of the sending hotmail.com server was bay16-f1.bay16.hotmail.com [65.54.186.51], which I verified was also on the SORBS blocklist.
Refererences: