Quote:
Originally Posted by tony17112acst
Comcast concluded that Comcast is indeed not handing off the emails to Freehostia because:
"They lack a valid: DMARC record, SPF record and DKIM record."
I will have to research all that and send a message to Freehostia's support, but I thought I'd post here first :-)
But I did ask to clarify and they were clear that it's NOT the case that Frehostia is rejecting the messages, it's that Comcast refuses to hand them off due to the lack of protocol.
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While it's certainly within Comcast's rights to do this, it strikes me as beyond bizarre that they would do so.
From Comcast's point of view, DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records are used for
receiving mail from a domain. They should not care one bit if the domain doesn't have them when they're
sending messages — they really serve absolutely no purpose in this case.... leaving aside that these records are completely
optional, there's nothing in these records that Comcast could possibly care about in terms of validating whether they should send to Freehostia or not. DMARC and DKIM are completely irrelevant to sending, and if they're trying to use SPF to validate a target server, that's just wrong as that's not what SPF is for.
Further, did they say it was because
your domain doesn't have these records, or because
freehostia.com doesn't have these records?
The bottom line is I think they're grasping at straws here and trying to come up with an easy explanation to try and get you off the phone.
One thing we haven't established yet: Can you
receive email from your Freehostia-hosted domain at your comcast.net address? If you haven't tested this, it would be worth doing so, as it would be a very helpful clue as to what's going on.
For
receiving mail, Comcast could certainly refuse to accept messages from domains that don't have valid SPF, DMARC, and DKIM records, although it would be seriously antisocial of them to do so — again these records aren't mandatory, and there are lots of domains that don't have them in place.
However, sending a test message from your Freehostia-hosted domain to your comcast.net address would also be useful in determining if the connection problem exists in both directions. If Freehostia can't reach Comcast, you might get a more useful error message from their servers, which might help to indicate where the problem actually is.
Even if you can send in one direction or not the other, that's a good indication of where things are working and where they're not, and will help to narrow down the problem.