David Sharpe wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Recently (Mid-January 2008) Hotmail has developed some intermittent
> delivery problem with email being
> sent through our server.
>
> * A new message to a hotmail address is discarded by Hotmail and never
> shown to the user
> * A reply to a message - to a hotmail address - is delivered reliably
> * All email from Hotmail to our server is delivered reliably
>
> Mail logs show mail is queued correctly on the Hotmail servers in all
> cases - any suggestions as to why
> mail is suddenly being silently dropped?
>
>
We had the same problem. I solved it by adding an SPF entry to our DNS
server:
example.com. IN TXT "v=spf1 mx mx:mail.example.com -all"
(mail.example.com representing our outgoing and incoming mail server).
Originally, following the recommendation made by the SPF wizard at
http://www.openspf.org/, we had "v=spf1 mx mx:mail.example.com ~all"
(note the tilde instead of the dash), but that was apparently not good
enough for hotmail. See http://www.openspf.org/SPF_Record_Syntax for an
explanation of the SPF syntax.
Regards, Peter