*SOLVED* Failed 4.4.7/5.7.1 Delivery from Hotmail accounts to our company Exchange server *SOLVED*

Hi Brian 

Thanks for your reply, 

I am aware of the 4.4.7 error but why is this only happening when people from Hotmail account send to us? 

Every one else can send emails to us fine, I even did a test connectivity (https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com) which also worked. 

The Hotmail users are getting bounce backs, I did a test from my own personal Hotmail account and got the following from the header of the bounced back email:

Content-Type: message/delivery-status

Reporting-MTA: dns;BAY004-OMC3S7.hotmail.com
Received-From-MTA: dns;BAY179-W54
Arrival-Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 09:17:09 -0700

Final-Recipient: rfc822;*** Email address is removed for privacy ***
Action: failed
Status: 5.7.1
Diagnostic-Code: smtp;554 5.7.1 <*** Email address is removed for privacy ***>: Relay access denied
We do not use any 3rd party antispam - we have on site a Netgear UTM25S which does spam filtering but this only flags spam and does no blocking. 

I've seen posts about this before.  It's a sign that Microsoft's message transport is not using your MX record in DNS properly, but may instead be using the A or CNAME record.  Message transports should never produce the error you cite.

Tell me your domain or send it to me via the address in my profile here and I can pass it on to the Outlook.com team for investigation.

I have send you an email with my domain, any information you can provide is much appreciated. 

I think you may be on the right track when you said its missing the MX record and trying to send to either and A or CNAME entry.

Thanks for you help on this.

Hi all 

To give everyone who reads this an update I have done the following:

1) Added a SPF record

2) Added a PTR record

3) Spoke to our Static IP supplier and asked them to do a reverse DNS entry to match our MX record

4) Deleted all CNAME entries that were not relevant (e.g. pop.server.com, mail.server.com)

5) Checked all other domains that point to our mail server to check if there are any conflicting DNS entries. 

None of the above worked. 

After going through what seemed like every DNS avenue I started to look back at our own setup. We use use a Netgear UTM25S firewall but this is set up to log incoming emails not block anything.

Some people with the Netgear UTM25 found a solution in turned off scanner / filtermail - this didn't work for us, but we did found a post that someone said Hotmail had changed their SMTP configuration which can not be read by some firewalls and updating the Netgear firmware version to 3.6.0-32 fixes the problem.

I am scheduling a day out of hours to do this, I will let you know if this works.

Hi Matt26UK,

I understand that you're still unable to send emails. Let me help you with this.

Based on the Numeric code and the error message you've provided, you are trying to relay your mail through another SMTP server, and that server does not allow you to relay. For further, more detailed information on this, please refer to the article below.

How do I interpret the delivery failure message that I have received?

We look forward to working with you to resolve this matter. Please do let us know how you get on and somebody will work with you if the issue continues.

Thanks,

Christina

Hi Christina 

Thank you for your response, 

Can you explain why you think we are trying to use a relay to send our mail? We only have one mail server that sends all our mail, we can sent out email fine and we can also receive all emails except any coming FROM Hotmail. 

Thanks

Matt 

Hello Matt,

We appreciate your time and effort for clarifying the issue.

It seems that you can't receive an email coming from Hotmail recipient only. With that, we suggest to check your domain's receiving server.

Also, the error might occur because the domain/ email address is not included in the white list of Microsoft. For us to verify this, we would like to ask for the exact domain affected so we can investigate it further on our end.

Kindly provide the information needed on the private message for security reasons.

Note: You need to click the notification that states You have a private reply to this message. Click here to read it on our secure private message section or by clicking the Private Messages tab.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,

Christina