But isnt complying with existing standards/rules (in this case RFC compliance) best practise?
yes, at a minimum. There is nothing "insane" about what MX is requiring of your mail server.
In which case the receiver is not following best practise by blocking my mail? :)
It his server, he sets his policies, he checks your server against his policies, and blocked it. The problem is with your server more probably than it is with his policies.
I agree that it will be perfect to have the ehlo and reverse dsn lookup the same.
"perfect" is pejorative in this situation. What he is asking for is not difficult to do.
As your own policy, you should setup your DNS and SMTP so that you meet best practices, to avoid the very delivery failures you are having, and to make it easier and more reliable for MXs to distinguish your supposedly legit server from spammers.
but would it be possible that there might be some reason/situation that it is not possible to set this up.
yes, but in that case, YOU have to decide whether you should be running a mail server if you can't comply. He has decided he doesn't want your mail.
..which is why rfc does not have this rule probably?.
He is going beyond what the RFCs, say, but it's his mail server, his policies.
...it would be very helpful if anyone knows situations in which this cannot be setup or should it always be possible to set this up.....
To repeat, if you cannot setup your mailserver and DNS to meet "best practices", then you should not expect the rest of Internet to waste their time making exceptions, whitelisting, for you. We lose enough money and time with spam, what's the point in wasting our time and money with "legit" servers that are badly set up?
this would be helpful for me in comparing with my own setup and deciding whether to go with the change or not.
In DNS:
the sending IP a.b.c.d. must have a FQDN like label.domain.tld:
d.c.b.a.in-addr.arpa. PTR label.domain.tld.
... which should have a matching A record:
label.domain.tld. A a.b.c.d.
and it should have MX records, to faciltate receving mail to the abuse@ and postmaster@
label.domain.tld. MX 10 label.domain.tld.
Having both A and MX records for label.domain.tld. raises your DNS credentials higher.
In SMTP, the server should say helo :
HELO label.domain.tld
and should give an an SMTP greeting:
220 label.domain.tld
There, isn't that "perfectly" easy, once you know what to do? And doing the above will not "break" anything else. That's just typical FUD, a pretext for not doing a good job.
If you don't have the control or the competence to setup DNS and SMTP correctly, relay your outbound through a machine that is setup correctly. Your mail deliveries will be more assured, and you'll waste less of other people's time and money.
Len
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