French domains + EuroDNS + 1&1 = Utter madness
November 12th, 2008
Self-proclaimed “office stapler” Mark discusses the joys and complications of switching servers:
Ah phone support, what a joy! I just spent a good hour:
* Trying to get the nice-but-clueless support assistants to understand the problem
* Being passed around like an office stapler
* Listening to cheesy cheesy music… which made me wonder while I sat drumming my fingers – instead of the awful music, would it be possible route the radio through the phone… press 1 for Chris Moyles, 2 for Terry Wogan, etc.… I’m sure its technically possible, but you would probably have to get a broadcasting licence/pay royalties/taxes… ANYWAY I diverge.
So a little background to the problem I found myself in:
The French domain is registered with EuroDNS. I want to host with 1&1, so I use an external domain and try changing the name servers to 1&1. All fine and dandy… until suddenly an error from EuroDNS – “You must set up the postmaster email address first”.Fine, I think – easy enough, set up a quick forward to my own email address in 1&1 and away we go – It’s only checking that mail can be delivered to that that server so I don’t need to do anything else…
Still not working – weird! I telnet from in to find out whats going on…
$ telnet mx01.1and1.co.uk 25
Trying 212.227.15.169…
Connected to mx01.1and1.co.uk.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 mx-b.kundenserver.de (mxeu0) Welcome to Nemesis ESMTP server
ehlo www.obanmultilingual.com
250-mxeu0.kundenserver.de
250-PIPELINING
250-8BITMIME
250-SIZE 52428800
250 HELP mail from: test@test.com
250 mail from: < test @ test.com> ok
rcpt to: postmaster@<domain>.fr
550 won’t relay to postmaster@<domain>.fr
550 won’t relay? Why not? It’s a perfectly valid email address set up via the control panel. Hmm strange…
This is where it starts to go horribly wrong. I call up 1&1 (on an 0871 number, so its going to cost a bomb!). Trying to get through to someone that looks after the servers and knows the rejection rules is very, very hard! Eventually, however, I have the answer and it seems a bit mad.
“If the MX record isn’t already set to 1&1 and the email address isn’t a mailbox then it won’t accept it.”
I’m not sure I understand why they’ve implemented that, but at least it gives me my answer:
* Change the forward to a mailbox
* Change the MX record in EuroDNS to 1&1 (fortunately EuroDNS let you do this quite easily)
From what I understand either of these would work, but I decided not to leave things to chance and do them both. Finally I can change the nameservers. Problem solved!
Cheers! Mark
