rcn.com vs. rcn.net -- was that really necessary?

[jducoeur]

Lost a couple of hours yesterday trying to debug a problem I've been noticing for weeks now: I suddenly can't send test emails from my computer at home. It used to work fine (which is enormously useful for development -- I send a very small number, and only to myself, but they make life much easier), but they stopped working sometime since Christmas.

Fortunately, I have a well-trained sense of the capricious changes that ISPs are prone to. The error message I was getting was consistently that "querki@rcn.com" isn't a valid email address, despite the fact that all of their documentation says that's what you should put into your mailer and it's what used to work. So just for giggles, I changed that to "querki@rcn.net" -- and it started working again. How very special...

Comments

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

Does it depend on your account? I've been using my @rcn.com email address every day without problems.

[jducoeur]

Not at all sure. Do you send email via a local web client such as Outlook/Firefox on your home desktop?

For all I know, this may be peculiar to our account -- I'm not seeing a storm of people complaining that their Outlook stopped working. Damned strange bug, though, especially the way that it was consistently working for months and then just wasn't...

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

It goes through Thunderbird on the desk machine. Anywhere else, I use https://webmail.rcn.com and log in that way.

[laurion]

Huh. Doing a 'dig' on rcn.com and rcn.net it looks like the mx server for rcn.com is outside of their typical IP range (69.x.x.x isntead of 207.x.x.x) so I'm wondering if there is some sort of routing or DNS issue.

[jducoeur]

Possible -- could dovetail with the erratic DNS problems I've been having lately. Those eased off not long after I posted about them last week, but it wouldn't astonish me if there is still strangeness going on.

Also possibly related: when I actually telnet in and do a HELO by hand, the response is coming from "smtp01.rcn.cmh.synacor.com". Don't know if the indirection through Synacor is causing additional confusions somehow...

RCN e-mail problems

[robert-huff.livejournal.com]

Lost a couple of hours yesterday trying to debug a problem I've been noticing for weeks now: I suddenly can't send test emails from my computer at home. It used to work fine (which is enormously useful for development -- I send a very small number, and only to myself, but they make life much easier), but they stopped working sometime since Christmas.

For about the last 2-3 weeks I have been unable to send email - at all - from my (RCN-connected) home machine.
A set-up which for years relayed without complaint through RCN's servers now bounces _everything_ with "554 5.7.1 [P4] Mail blocked due to spam content in the message."
Opened a ticket; they think it's me.
*Gr-r-r-r-r-r-r*

Robert Huff