1&1 tightens up Email spam rules

I use 1and1 for my personal and business websites as well as for our clients. We’ve had a client recently that was not receiving emails from one of their colleagues and of course the other company’s IT person said it was our problem. Having been an email administrator for many years I always like to look into the bounced back messages, smtp connection info, email headers, and more to track down a problem. This particular issue was perplexing because there where not many posts on the net about it. When someone was trying to send an email to a domain hosted at 1and1 it sent this error after the RCPT TO line:

421 invalid sender domain, possibly misconfigured

I tested at http://www.wormly.com/test_smtp_server (which is a great site btw) to get test the error.

So I sent an email to 1and1 support to see if they could help. This was the very speedy response:

The circumstances you have just described is caused by a RFC-non-compliant configuration of the despatcher-domain. The MX-Server
of the domain has no registered A-record, but merely a CNAME-record this is why the e-mail is rejected by our e-mail servers.

You can find some general information about this topic here:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2181.html

To provide the e-mail delivery as fast as possible again, we kindly advise you to inscribe the target domain of the CNAME-record as MX-record. For further information, please contact the provider of the despatcher-domain.

Looks like the 1and1 is blocking any non RFC compliant domains. In the rfc spec above it says:

10.3. MX and NS records

The domain name used as the value of a NS resource record, or part of
the value of a MX resource record must not be an alias.
…

Additional section processing does not include CNAME records, let alone the address records that may be associated with the canonical name derived from the alias.

So if you are a DNS admin or setup DNS for clients make sure to have the MX record for your domains be A records (they directly resolve to an ip) not CNAME records. So far I have had to email a couple of hosting companies related to this issue. I applaud 1and1 for locking down their email servers even more to thwart spam, but it would have been nice to have had a link or faq on their site explaining what was going on. Thus the reason for this lengthy blog post.

Some other posts on the web about this issues:

Useful links to test out DNS and MX records:

9 Responses to “1&1 tightens up Email spam rules”

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1 Laura from SEO‍‍Shropshire.com Aug 4th, 2009 at 5:22 pm

It seems they aren’t the only ones to be tightening up their email systems at the moment. GMail now require you to verify all accounts via SMS and YMail want you to type a captcha in to send your first email.
2 Partnersuche Singles Aug 26th, 2009 at 4:23 am

1&1 not only offering cheaper domain names as well as safer email accounts. That’s cooler.
3 Robin Sep 2nd, 2009 at 5:32 am

Thanks for publishing this.

1and1 reputation as a difficult ISP is safe. I am fairly sure that if everyone implemented the RFCs to the letter lots of other stuff would stop working too. Not a great idea!
4 Yan from Managed Hosting Sep 2nd, 2009 at 9:11 am

More and more companies are trying to clamp down on spam which is a good thing – in theory. I find the problem with automated programs spotting spam is that they flag non spam as being spam.

I’ve also found this with some blogs where after a comment a message will apeear saying my comment seems spammy, although it isn’t at all.
5 Terry from Dickies Scrubs Sep 6th, 2009 at 10:32 pm

I haven’t heard of them until I stumbled upon this post. So I’m gonna probably give them a try seeing how much I hate spam. I’m more of a namecheap guy and I’m happy with them. But there’s no harm in trying 1and1 right?
6 Mark from sunrise mountain real estate Sep 7th, 2009 at 7:09 am

I was looking for a good webhosting already and perhaps I’ve found it. I am not sure whether they provide setup for Wordpress or not but I will have to email them, they’ve got some cheap prices as compared to some other services I checked.
7 anthony from birthday gifts, display cases, birthday presents ,gifts ,wedding presents Sep 24th, 2009 at 7:54 am

Hi there i was just surfing the net and came across your site, i hate spam,I will use 1and1 for my personal and business websites as well as for our clients, i am so glad i came across your site, many thanks Anthony.
8 Andrew from body health Feb 3rd, 2010 at 2:03 pm

To be honest, it’s about time. Until recently, 1 and 1 has an atrocious record for spam filtering.

@Mark – they don’t have a Wordpress config tool but they do provide the MySQL server backends with a simple to use GUI configurator. All you need to do is upload your WP files and connect to the db that you create.