Greetings everyone,
As users of Road Runner High Speed’s e-mail services may be aware, Road Runner has a fairly strict but simplistic e-mail blocking policy that targets medium to high volume e-mail senders.
Some background
Road Runner has a series of e-mail servers across the United States. Unlike other providers, Road Runner breaks up their e-mail load by district, assigning each Road Runner user a district-specific e-mail address. For example, a user from Texas may have an e-mail address like;
user@tx.rr.com
This e-mail will be handled by the end-point mail server;
mx.tx.rr.com
Each e-mail server in the Road Runner pool has a blocking list and rules governing what it will and will not accept.
Why this poses a problem
Because e-mail for Road Runner is handled in such a fragmented manner, and because each individual mail server has it’s own block list, mail forwarding to any *.rr.com address becomes inconsistent and erratic. To top it off Road Runner mail servers will accept a very low number of connections per hour, meaning any server external to Road Runner that tries to send more than five messages at a time is temporarily barred from sending any e-mail for a variable period.
Our traditional method for dealing with such blocks is to route the mail through another mail server that we operate, but the number of messages that triggers a Road Runner e-mail server to block is so low that no matter how many of these re-routes we do, the end result is always another e-mail block.
Our alternate solution in this case would be to throttle e-mail destined to Road Runner mail servers in an attempt to avoid offending the mail filters in question which will no doubt slow down final delivery from EasyDNS mail maps to Road Runner.
We have a number of customers who use Road Runner’s e-mail service, which leads to a dilemma; do we forward each piece of legitimate mail to each user at once (as any user might expect) and get blocked at random, or do we throttle the e-mail destined to Road Runner end-points in an attempt to avoid being barred from sending any rr.com e-mail at all?
As an administrative policy, we try to avoid mail slowdowns at any cost. Deliberately introducing them for a select series of customers is not our preferred solution.
An alternative
The alternative to using Road Runner as an end-point for forwarded mail is to use another mail provider; an e-mail provider with a proven track record who can handle the mail load that they have pledged to receive for their customers.
Using another mail forwarding service other than EasyDNS to forward mail to a Road Runner address would not alleviate this problem, because Road Runner does not discriminate between most forwarding services. The problem would move with your domain.
We have had great success with some of the free e-mail provider alternatives as end-points for EasyDNS mail forwarding. GMail for example has been consistently capable of receiving e-mail from our forwarding service without implementing draconian e-mail blocks.
Something to remember if you a client of both EasyDNS and Road Runner; this is your e-mail that they are deliberately blocking. They are not protecting your account from rogue spammers or viruses if they are arbitrarily blocking legitimate e-mail without even inspecting the contents or the hosts.
If you need to continue to use your rr.com address as a forwarding end-point, we urge you to contact Road Runner in the event that your e-mail is blocked and request that they allow you to receive your mail. You can get verification from our support reps at support@easydns.com as to wether Road Runner is blocking mail destined to your address.
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