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Our domain subscription was cancelled this morning due to an expired credit card on the account. A slew of problems followed. We got our domain back up and running and Most of the problems have been resolved, but for some reason, we are still unable to receive external e-mails.

We have contacted our ISP and everything seems to be checking out fine.

We have:

-Reset our web filter

-Reset our Email server

-Verified DNS is functioning properly (Internally and Externally)

I went on mxtoolbox.com to see if I could pull any errors, and sure enough, this is what I found:

enter image description here

Shortly after taking this screenshot, I contacted our ISP again and notified them of these warnings. They proceeded to tell us that they were also having "computer problems". What that means remains to be seen at this point. I am still waiting on a call back.

Does anyone have any troubleshooting tips/advice for me to try? Could this just be our ISP?

*UPDATE 1 - 3:00 PM

Our ISP is guessing that we are in propagation, which is frustrating. Should we wait it out?

*UPDATE 2 - 3:35 PM

I did some more digging and found this post on Stack - How to troubleshoot unreceived emails that do not bounce back?

^ In short, the poster explains that ultimately, it was a problem with his provider. Their IP was blacklisted. I was curious, so I did a blacklist search on mxtools.com of our providers address, and boom. Their address was blacklisted.

I am waiting on a call back at the moment. When I get a response, I will edit my question and post an appropriate answer.

*UPDATE 3 - 6:00 PM (In response to an answer below) This information might be useful.

  • We do not host antivirus/antispam on our server. That is provided through our ISP.

  • Our ISP has notified us that the server hosting our spam filter is taking on a large processing load. However, there is no delay between sending/receiving messages. It either works, or it doesn't. It functions very sporadically, it works for 20 min, but then it wont work for an hour.

  • In the hour-long duration of not being able to receive external messages, we are getting a domain name error. Shown below:

enter image description here

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2 Answers 2

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I wouldn't expect the issues noted in the MXToolBox report to prevent others from sending email to valid accounts on your email server.

An nslookup shows the mail exchanger (MX) records for your domain name pointing to the following systems:

> set querytype=mx
> midwestglove.com
Server:         ns38.worldnic.com
Address:        207.204.21.119#53

midwestglove.com        mail exchanger = 30 midwestglove.com.mxc.socket.net.
midwestglove.com        mail exchanger = 10 midwestglove.com.mxa.socket.net.
midwestglove.com        mail exchanger = 20 midwestglove.com.mxb.socket.net.
midwestglove.com        mail exchanger = 40 midwestglove.com.mxd.socket.net.
>

If you are unfamiliar with MX DNS records, if any are specified in the DNS records for your domain, any external mail server will attempt to deliver email to any account in your domain via the server specified in an MX record.

Are those correct? The one with the lowest number is the one to which other email servers will first attempt to deliver email to your domain. If the one with a value of 10 isn't reachable, an email server attempting to send email to your domain would then try the next higher-numbered one. If, instead of using those mail exchanger systems, you wish to have email delivered directly to your own server, set an MX record for your domain to have a lower number than any of those, e.g., 5, or get rid of them, if those aren't the systems that should process your incoming mail. E.g., if you have a DNS record pointing to mail.midwestgove.com as the server to which you wish to have other servers deliver email to midwestglove.com email addresses, set it in an MX record as the only MX record or at least the lowest numbered one; I'd delete the others, if those systems, which I'm presuming are default ones provided by your ISP, aren't the servers you want receiving your incoming email.

For troubleshooting, if you have an external email account, e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, etc., send email from one of those accounts to a valid email account in your domain and look at the message returned in any bounced email. That should provide you with a clue as to why email isn't being delivered. If you don't have an account on one of those free email services, I'd recommend creating one to use for troubleshooting email problems. I find it helpful to have several external email accounts to use for troubleshooting email delivery problems.

Update: Do you have any antivirus or antispam software on the email server that might be discarding some legitimate email messages? Sometimes, if antispam software is tuned to be very aggressive in its analysis it can block many legitimate email messages, or a sending IP address can be on a block list, though I would expect you would see bounced messages if that was the case. But something else to check is whether any logs related to such software show any of the legitimate email messages being blocked.

For the email that is getting through, do you see long delays between when email is sent and when it is received? Normally sending servers will continue to attempt delivery for 5 days, if a receiving server is unresponsive. If the receiving server is having issues due to CPU or network loading, etc., a sending server may not be able to deliver email on its first attempt, but may try again a few hours later and be able to successfully deliver the email then. Or it might fail again and queue the email for another attempt a few more hours later. For the bounced email that you were receiving, did the messages in the bounced email indicate any temporary delivery problem? If you have the error codes, those can reveal whether the sending server encountered what appears to be a permanent delivery problem, e.g. an invalid email address, or whether it may be a temporary problem, e.g. an account that is over its mail quota.

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  • Yes. Indeed, those are correct. This just isn't making any sense. We have been receiving emails sporadically since last night. Where earlier in the day yesterday, we were receiving bounce back e-mails. Now we are not. All emails sent from our third party accounts are being sent successfully, but we aren't necessarily receiving all of them.
    – Anthony Sims
    Jun 3, 2016 at 13:56
  • @Anthony Sims, I updated my response to include some additional troubleshooting information.
    – moonpoint
    Jun 3, 2016 at 22:13
  • I have also updated my question to suit your response.
    – Anthony Sims
    Jun 3, 2016 at 23:02
  • My hunch is that it has got something to do with the receiving server, which is held by our ISP. They told me that their server was working double-time, and we thought maybe that was the reason. You just confirmed that it is a possibility. So Im not sure what to do at this point. We are on the phones. Thank you very much for the help.
    – Anthony Sims
    Jun 4, 2016 at 1:38
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At last, and after 3 days, we have found the cure for our ailment.

It appears there was an issue with the domain renewal, which is something we were halfway expecting. Our domain expired at the end of May. In June, the domain was renewed, but it took a couple of days to propagate.

Our ISP's spam filter pointed to the correct IP address, but it was resolving to a different one. They made the fix and all is well.

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