Some background...

I have a slightly odd problem, in that my main outbound mail server is seemingly being blocked by one of the UK's major budget web/mail hosts. My postfix logs show things like this:

status=deferred (lost connection with athena.hosts.co.uk[85.233.160.20] while receiving the initial server greeting)

and a manual test via telnet results in the connection being closed immediately it's opened:

telnet 85.233.160.20 25
Trying 85.233.160.20...
Connected to 85.233.160.20.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.

I have no idea why they are doing this, as my server isn't listed in any blocklist that I can find. I suspect it may actually be a configuration error on their end, but I'm finding it difficult to get in contact there with someone of sufficient clue to even understand the problem, let alone resolve it.

I've put in a workaround using transport maps to simply hand off mail for affected domains to my other mail server (which normally handles inbound mail), and from there it gets through OK. But that requires an entry in the transport table for each affected domain, and I keep encountering new ones - some of which I may only ever need to mail once or twice and never again!

What I'd like to do, therefore, is set the transport based on the domain's MX records rather than the domain itself, so that any domain which uses that company's mail servers will be rerouted to avoid the block.

That doesn't appear to be possible using the transport table itself, unless I'm misreading the documentation. I could, of course, do it by adding a local DNS entry to fool my server into sending mail to a different IP address (that is, make *.hosts.co.uk resolve to my other mail server), but I'd prefer not to do that as it will affect things other than mail.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Mark
--
http://mark.goodge.co.uk

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