When using MercuryE for direct delivery, you may sometimes find it necessary to control how your outbound mail is routed. This is particularly useful if you host your mail server on a dynamic IP address, your IP address is located in a "residential" block, or your IP address is affected by "collateral damage" from DNS blocking lists. All of these may cause your mail to be rejected by opther servers that use various DNSBLs, such as the NJABL DynaBlock list. Using this method, you can cause MercuryE to route mail bound for specific domains to a different SMTP server, such as your ISP's mail server.

Note: This article assumes you are using the haneWIN DNS server, as detailed in DNSWhiteLists. If you are using a different DNS server, you will need to modify the steps as required. You must be running your own DNS server to do what is described here.

You can use your internal DNS server to control how mail is routed to various domains. This is useful in situations where you use MercuryE for direct to MX delivery, and a message recipient's ISP refuses to accept mail from your server's IP address. Some larger ISPs, such as AOL or RoadRunner refuse to accept mail from dynamic IP addresses or IP addresses they have determined are "residential" addresses. You can use your new DNS server to force Mercury/32 to deliver mail for these domains to your ISP's mail server, which will relay it for you.

I will use yahoo.com for my example, since I don't have an aol.com account to use for testing purposes.

  1. Determine the host name of your ISP's mail server. You MUST have a hostname. An IP address will not work. The host name is usually in the form of mail.isp.com or smtp.isp.com.

  2. From the haneWIN DNS Server Options menu, select Add Entry. Enter values as follows:

    Type: Mail Server (MX)

    Host or Domain: (Domain of mail to redirect with a trailing period)

    Preference: 0

    Mail Server: (hostname of your ISP's mail server with a trailing period)

    Note the trailing periods where specified. If you do not enter the trailing periods, this will not work.

    Click the OK button. The new entry should now be listed similar to this:

    yahoo.com. MX 0 smtp.isp.com
  3. Test your entry by sending mail through the server to this domain. You should see an entry in the MercuryE console window resolving the MX for that domain to the IP address of your ISP's SMTP server.
One page links to ReroutingOutboundMail:
 . Page Name .   . Last Modified . 
 Mercury32   June 28, 2006 8:39 am