Unable to send email to our club members alias

This issue has been frustrating for me. Perhaps it's because I see other support requests where you've provided specific information about what happened and managed to find a way to resolve their issue. Meanwhile, I've received opaque responses that fail to point to any specific root cause. Instead, I'm accused of having email that doesn't follow the rules and is hosted by datacenters that are havens for spammers.

I've been using the same email host for almost 15 years without issues, including half a year using FTH. Then suddenly in December it stopped working with FTH. As president of our club, who regularly sends emails to our members, this is very inconvenient for me. I would like to find out why it stopped working.

Do you have any specific information that you can provide to me to indicate what exactly is causing my email to be refused? I would very much appreciate it.

Paul

Your emails are not coming from the advertised IP for your domain.
We are not blocking email from these IP addresses which are the IP advertised by your DNS.

A 208.113.163.242
MX (0) mx1.mailchannels.net
MX (0) mx2.mailchannels.net
A-->mx1.mailchannels.net 44.241.163.138
A-->mx1.mailchannels.net 44.230.102.231
A-->mx2.mailchannels.net 44.230.102.231
A-->mx2.mailchannels.net 44.241.163.138

paul wrote: This issue has been frustrating for me. Perhaps it's because I see other support requests where you've provided specific information about what happened and managed to find a way to resolve their issue. Meanwhile, I've received opaque responses that fail to point to any specific root cause. Instead, I'm accused of having email that doesn't follow the rules and is hosted by datacenters that are havens for spammers.
Paul

Paul, please do not take any of our posts personally. We know that most people don't realize (or don't consider it) that their email service might be a spammer (or may use a data center that is a spammer) when they choose an email service. It is an unfortunate fact that we sometimes have to be the ones to deliver the bad news when our server gets hammered with spam which triggers the IP address block.

Also, we really have to have the automated email security protection schemes in place for the server to keep the FTH platform viable for the long run. If we loosened our server security, the server would get hammered to the point where it would slow down considerably and none of the system users would want to use FTH anymore. (because they would also get much of the spam that we are currently blocking)

We do the best we can to help our users given what we have to work with, and depending on our users technical savviness and ability to provide us key troubleshooting information. I always tell users to be patient and persistent with us. Remember that we are volunteers and also Toastmasters members like you. I know that Brian does want to help you get your issue resolved and he is the best guy to help you with this. Please hang in there with us.

Brian, Steve,

Thanks for your responses. I'm really trying not to take it personally. I understand you are volunteers, and I already appreciate the support and patience you have provided so far. At the same time, I want to let you know that it's still frustrating having my expectations set by other forum posts that have had similar issues resolved (albeit temporarily) while after all this time I'm still at a loss as to why my emails are being rejected. That being said, I will try to be patient if you will be patient with me. And if you invite me to be persistent, then I will be persistent!

On to the technical puzzle…

From Brian's most recent reply, he suggests that my emails are not coming from the advertised IP for my domain. This suggests that it is not an IP block issue but a DNS/delivery issue. In that case, I have the following questions:

First, email headers from previous emails that I successfully sent to the members alias (and which includes a return to myself) suggest that nothing has meaningfully changed from how my email is delivered to your servers. Why would it suddenly stop working in December?

Second, I don't understand why email delivered to your servers must come from IP addresses that match the MX records of the sender's domain. My understanding is that the MX records are for discovering delivery targets for a domain and does not necessarily have anything to do with how email is delivered from users in a domain. Assuming I have a proper understanding of MX records, why would your servers reject emails that don't come from addresses advertised in MX records? (And it would suggest that you'd have a lot more people unable to send email if you were really doing this, so I'm not convinced that your servers are even doing it.)

Third, my domain should support SPF and DKIM to authenticate sent email. Is this not being used, or is it failing, or is it somehow not sufficient?

I hope you can see where I'm coming from. The issue still seems very opaque to me. The only thing I have is a 421 error that eventually times out after several hours when the relay stops trying. My understanding from internet searches is that this is a common "soft bounce" method of rejecting spammers who would typically not stick around to keep retrying after a 421 error. If this is what your server is doing to my email, why do your servers think my email is spam?

Thanks,
Paul

Please contact Dreamhost and get the EXACT IP addresses that your account will send email from and I will check if those are blocked.

Putting every IP that dreamhost owns is not creating a valid spf record
include:netblocks.dreamhost.com include:relay.mailchannels.net is not a valid spf.

Here are some of the headers from an email recently sent to a hotmail address. Do these help answer your request? Meanwhile, I can ping Dreamhost again.

Authentication-Results: spf=pass (sender IP is 23.83.212.6) smtp.mailfrom=kromann.net; hotmail.com; dkim=pass (signature was verified) header.d=kromann.net;hotmail.com; dmarc=bestguesspass action=none header.from=kromann.net;compauth=pass reason=109
Received-Spf: Pass (protection.outlook.com: domain of kromann.net designates 23.83.212.6 as permitted sender) receiver=protection.outlook.com; client-ip=23.83.212.6; helo=aye.elm.relay.mailchannels.net;