We have been experiencing various problems getting outgoing email delivered to recipients, usually those using CompuServe or AOL. I have assumed this difficulty had it origins in the way in which our Exchange Server or some other aspect of our outbound email processing (our ISP denies it has anything to do with the problems) has been configured. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to delve into the matter and the trouble continues.

 

This morning trying to send email to a colleague I encountered a new problem, seemingly unrelated to the earlier problems (error reports are not the same). The error report related to the current failure is as follows: 

 

 "There was a SMTP communication problem with the recipient's email server.  Please contact your system administrator.
           

How do I adjust our system settings to provide "PTR" for unauthenticated connections? Is this something we can fix in Exchange or SBS2003, or it the authentication problem outside our system (or is it somehow related to our Symantec virus protection/firewall program)?

 

Any insights would be appreciated.

 

Thanks,

 

Barry Herlihy

Hi Barry,

 

Check with www.dnsreport.com your email domain. It will probably complain about a missing PTR record there too. Solution is to ask your provider to submit it, or to setup another SMTP connector for those AOL domains and let that mail go through the smarthost (email server of your provider).