I own/use my own domain for email. It’s hosted with a reputable company (WebHostingHub). I have no problem sending messages to anyone with one exception…those who use Roadrunner for their ISP. Their email addresses end with: “…san.rr.com.”
This started a few weeks ago and it matters not whether messages are sent from my address or that of my wife… Roadrunner just doesn’t seem to like my domain. The bounce back looks like this:
“A message you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error.”
Would an ISP, in this case Roadrunner, even talk to me, a non Roadrunner customer, about this?
You need to call roadrunner and talk to their tech people. I’d WAG, for whatever reason, they’ve blocked your domain as being spam. But, whatever it is, I’m guessing you won’t be able to fix it from your end.
You might try, just for kicks, connecting to the internet through a VPN and routing your traffic through some other part of the country. If it works with the VPN, it might be related to your IP address, which you can take care of from your end.
I have run into this a couple times with customers, call their tech support folks, they can escalate it to whomever handles the blacklist of their mail servers and make the adjustment. Usually someone has faked your domain name for spamming generating a bunch of automated spam reports and putting you on their block list. you may never have even been aware of it.
Things like this are a big problem for lots of people who host their own email. Even when you have done absolutely nothing wrong, your email can get blocked just because it isn’t coming from gmail or one of the other big email hosts.
Use blacklisting sites search if your domain or server’s IP address has been put on one for some reason. If it’s a reputable blacklist, then there is going to be a way to get it taken off.
Next, make sure SPF and DKIM are working for your domain. Those help the receiving sites determine if an email that claims to come from your domain is actually coming from your domain. If you already have SPF and DKIM, check to make sure they are valid.
Depending on what level of support you get, these may be things your hosting provider can help with, or they may be things you have to do completely on your own. That is assuming that you are running your own mail server that delivers directly to the destination. If you only have a “smarthost” which uses your hosting provider to deliver messages, then they definitely need to help you setup SPF. In that case they may be able to tell you what to do, but you have to do it, or they may be able to do it for you.
I was recently having trouble with email from a local small business. They were sending me emails, but they weren’t getting through. They use Gsuite (Google’s suite of business applications, including email), which isn’t usually a problem. Investigating I found that their SPF record was invalid; they had two, which is not allowed. I mentioned to them that they should tell their tech person to fix the SPF record, and the salesman said they have a big problem with their emails ending up in customers’ spam folders. The moral is, a broken SPF record can cause lots of problems.
I had that happen once. I got to work in the morning, opened thunderbird and emails started pouring in. They were all bounced back either by ISPs or because the addresses were bad. There was something like 30k that my client was attempting to pull from the server. It got so bad that I ended up calling the company that hosts my domain (small, local company) and asked them for help. They, I think, must have been waiting for me to call. They saw the emails showing up a few hours earlier and shut down my account. I ended up having them delete everything from their end so I wouldn’t have to wait for my computer to download them all.
Luckily, nothing else became of it.
I’m glad I hadn’t yet gotten to the point of having my work emails on my phone. That would have made for an obnoxious night.
If you can, get logs as to what the email exchange conversation looks like. Email is incredibly primitive, the server interaction is actually readable. You may get something like “550 5.7.1 Server on blacklist” or some other quasi-English error code which will show you where to start. Presumably your IP is not blacklisted (mxtoolbox.com also checks blacklists) or a lot of other hosted emails would have the same problem…