Some frequently asked questions about our SMTP Feed service (also known as Store And Forward Mail).
Why isn't the mail coming through?
If your mail server is normally connected all the time, you should find that email normally passes through our server and on to yours very quickly.
However if your mail server was down for a while (e.g. if it crashed, or got turned off for the weekend, or if your Internet connection was down for a while), you might find that even after the problem has been rectified, that our server does not immediately send along any mail it has queued up for you.
This is quite normal; our server will try delivering the mail in its queue every now and then. Next time it tries to deliver your mail, it should find that your mail server is "up" again, and then the mail will be delivered.
Alternatively, you can use the SMTP "ETRN" command ("ETRN yourdomain.example.com") to ask our server to try delivery now. The command needs to be sent from your mail server (or at least, from the same IP address as your mail server). If our mail server handles multiple domains for you, you'll need to send one ETRN command per domain.
Finally, if you give us a ring we can push the mail through for you from this end.
Why are we getting so much spam from your server?
Our servers do not perform any spam filtering; they simply accept mail sent from anywhere to your domain, then pass that mail on to your mail server. The fact that you see spam coming from our server simply reflects the fact that spammers apparently like sending spam to your domain.
If your mail server performs spam filtering based on the sending IP address, you probably want to do at least one of:
- whitelist the IP addresses of the Powernet mail servers (195.60.31.0/24)
- check back through the "Received" headers to find the IP address of whoever sent the mail to the Powernet servers
drop us a line and ask about changing the settings on your domain to "standby" mode
What is "Standby" mode?
Normally, when your domain is added to our SMTP Feed mail servers, the servers will accept mail for your domain at any time.
If the domain is configured in "standby" mode, our servers will check to see whether or not your server is online and ready to accept mail. If your server reports that it is ready to accept mail, then our server will not accept mail for your domain (it returns a temporary error code).
This has the effect that, as long as your mail server is up, all incoming mail for your domain goes straight to your server (it never comes via our server). However, if your server goes down, then ours will accept (and queue, if necessary) mail for your domain, until such time as your server is back again.