Frosty The Snowman

I am having a small problem with my mail getting bounced back to me from customers using spam blacklists. Now I am not, and never have been, a spammer. The reason that the mail is getting bounced is because NTL don't do proper reverse DNS lookups.

As a result my domain doesn't match the domain provided by a reverse lookup test and the result given by a reverse lookup is a block of IP addresses some of which may well be dynamic IP home users who have been blacklisted.

Now I have called NTL to complain and they said just use our smart host smtp.ntlbusiness.com and it'll be fine, well that would be great but for one thing it puts in another process in me sending mails and it means emails can efffectively hit NTL and disappear with me none the wiser. Another small glitch is that the NTL connection is only used if the primary line, Demon ADSL, is down and I'm not sure if NTLs smart host would accept mail from a demon address........

Confused and dunno what do do about it.

For those who are interested I have two connections attached to a pair of PIX firewalls. I have a Cisco router in the network that detects if my Demon connection is live or not, by doing a ping or something I think, and if it's not it shunts all the outbound traffic to the NTL line, this doesn't worry the SMTP server as it doesn't need anything more than a connection to work. My MX records have an entry to use the NTL line if the Demon ones don't work.


Any suggestions? Anyone else use NTL and an SMTP server?