I hope this is the right place to post this. If not, maybe one of the moderators can move this to the proper place and let me know.

I purchased some shared reseller hosting and everything is fine except for 1 item: Their SMTP server refuses to accept outgoing mail using the typical mail.accoutname.com. I've tried authorization and I do POP before SMTP but nothing works. The Hostmaster is a bit "green" but, overall, it's a pretty decent package.

There is one out-of-the-ordinary things I wanted and I mention it here in case it has some influence. I wanted the reseller URL to be a dot com and the custom nameservers to be a dot net. For example: reseller account URL = reseller.com and nameservers = ns1.reseller.net and ns2.reseller.net I own both domain names and I do know how to set up a DN as a nameserver with my registrar.

Can anyone give me a clue that I might pass on to the Hostmaster?

Thanks.

So email isn't getting sent from your server to other servers?

Check firstly that reverse DNS on your server IP is set up correctly. Check the IP isn't blacklisted. If you have problems registering a private nameserver, you could ask your domain registrar to do this for you to ensure everything was working properly.

These are a few things that come to mind if email isn't being received on other servers from yours.

Dan

is mail.accountname.com set up in DNS?
is this a email client setup for the SMTP server or authentication name?

the hostname of the name server doesn't matter just as long as it is set to be authoritative for the A and MX records.

Hi Dan / Chris,

Thanks for your responses.

I ran across a whois by http://webhosting.info that I hadn't used before and decided to try that because it said it would also do a reverse IP which is something Dan had suggested. What an abortion! Some of the info showed old Nameservers and on DNs where I have custom Nameservers it showed N/A for ownership, etc. I'm going to look around for another site that will show reverse IPs.

In the meantime, the things I know are:
1) None of the DNs are blacklisted
2) The DN I use for the custom nameserver is set up correctly at my Registrar. It's something I've done dozens of times before
3) I know mail is not leaving the server (mail.domain.com) because I get the message that the SMTP server is not responding

As for your questions Chris, I've forwarded them to my Hosting Manager. He just now replied by requesting my password for the account. Just to be sure he's not up to something fishy (am I being too suspicious?) I changed the p/w to a temporary one which I will change back once things are finally cleared up.

Stay tuned.... the saga continues....