Help with small business server 2003

flashnazia

Hi

I'm not a computer expert and everything I know is self taught.

I'm the youngest here so I have beed entrusted with IT duties.

I need some help for the charity I work for. We have problems sending mail from our microsoft small business server to hotmail and microsoft users.

I think this is because our server IP address is different to that of the IP address our ISP (Nildram) gave us and so our IP is untraceable so microsoft thinks we are sending spam.

I tried to get the ISP to help but I don't think they speak English....

I have run DNS check at dns stuff and no ptr record was found for our server IP address.

I wonder if I should just go and change my server IP to that of the ISP allocated IP.

Is this dangerous? Will I mess up the server?

Please help!

droopsnoot

If you change the server IP to the ISP-allocated one, then it's effectively directly on the Internet, which has a lot of ramifications in terms of outside access and router firewall configuration. I did read an MS-related site (i.e. not an MS-basher) which advised very strongly against doing that, if the SBS machine is also used for a business server in the office. I believe this is because of vulnerabilities, and I should say it refers to SBS2000 rather than 2003, so this may not apply.

If you're using a LAN IP address on the server (192.168.0.0 or 10.0.0.0) then it will not be traceable over the Internet, but when your server connects to another server (that of the mail recipient), that server will see your routers WAN address anyway, not the LAN address. That's NAT (network address translation) - the router keeps track of the outgoing connection so it can re-translate any reply packets.

I have a mail server here which is on an external IP address, and I get problems sending emails to hotmail in that they're marked as spam and the users don't see them. The IP for that *is* the one that the domain has marked as its primary MX record, and it's configured in the domain SPF record as the registered mail server for that domain, and yet it still happens.

So having a LAN address on your server almost certainly isn't the issue here. Unfortunately I can't tell you what is, but I don't think that changing the server to have the ISP-provided IP will help.

flashnazia

Thanks for the help.

I don't know what to do. We advise people who have employment problems and have to email them sometimes with sample grievance letters and employment tribunal forms etc.
If they have a hotmail account we have to resort to using our personal email accounts to do this which is something we don't want to do!

If we do send mail to a hotmail account from our work email it stays in the server send queue until it expires. This also slows the queue!

And I though installing a server would help us.....

Little_John

Post the error message your getting back if you try to send an email to a hotmail address.

flashnazia

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject: test
Sent: 16/08/2007 16:35

The following recipient(s) could not be reached:

********@hotmail.com on 17/08/2007 16:53
Could not deliver the message in the time limit specified. Please retry or contact your administrator.
<name of our charity.org.uk #4.4.7>

bazza1603

Hi,

Just a thought. Can you access Hotmail.com from your office? I had a lot of strange problems with Hotmail and it was down to the router.

I have SBS 2003 and use public ISP DNS, but have a Sonicwall in place. This was set up by an IT company.

Regards

Baz

Fonz_2

A lot of mail services don't allow mail from dynamic SMTP hosts so you may need to configure your mail server to send outgoing mail via your ISP's own mail server.

flashnazia

In reply to Baz, I can access hotmail fine. It's only when I try to send email to hotmail or microsoft from work domain that it bounces back!

So what are the implications of sending outgoing mail via isp's server?

I'm just a bit worried about messing about with the server as it's newly installed (by a bunch of buffoons who we don't want to call back for advice as maintenance contract is a grand a year).

On another note, what is a fair price for IT maintenance contracts for small charities?

bazza1603

Hi,

I pay £4500 a year for 2 servers and 30 Pc's. This is with complicant travel software.

This covers unlimited call outs with most of the maintenance done via the Web.

I also get an engineer day every 6 weeks with an engineer onsite.

Regards

Barry

droopsnoot

If you can get to the Exchange mail server logs, it might be helpful to see those. The issue is that by the time you've had that message back from the server, all the useful information has been cut out. The mail server logs might show exactly *why* the mail could not be sent. Normally ours are sent just fine, but marshalled into the spam trap once they get there. This is an inability to send altogether, which is different to my problem.

On the maintenance, it's hard to say without more information on what is covered. To be honest it doesn't sound too over the top for anything that includes a Windows server, especially if you've got a few PCs, a router, and some other bits and pieces.

flashnazia

This is the error message I see when I check the SMTP small business connector queue;

The connection was dropped by the remote host.

Sending outgoing via isp doesn't help either!