no mailbox found when mailing a client

[ecobrazim]

Hi all,

I am having a problem mailing one of my clients. I am fairly sure that the problem is on his side but he assures me he can receive emails from everybody else.

Here is the message I get:

<jdoe@example.be>: host mail.example.be[87.98.222.111] said: 550 sorry, no mailbox here by that name. (#5.7.17) (in reply to RCPT TO command)

Of course, I can send to everybody else except to him... so who is in the wrong?

I did a little research and found the following which seems all wrong to me but hey, he gets emails so maybe I am in the wrong.


I checked to make sure the IP above did point to the clients domain (example.be)

$ host 87.98.222.111
87-98-222-111.ovh.net.

Now I see it points to OVH which is a French hosting provider. So where does the domain name point to?

$ dig mail.example.be
mail.example.be.      86400   IN      A       87.98.222.197

Now I try and telnet to test it and find out that there is yet another hosting provider 'hebergeons.be':

$ telnet mail.example.be 25
Trying 87.98.222.197...
Connected to mail.example.be.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 ns1.hebergeons.be ESMTP Postfix

The domain points to another IP than the one mentioned in the error. So what is my clients MX record pointing to?

$ dig example.be MX
example.be.           86400   IN      MX      10 mx.scarlet.be.

It's pointing to Scarlet which is a Belgian ISP.

and what's the IP for the server?

$ dig mx.scarlet.be.
mx.scarlet.be.          7200    IN      A       193.74.71.108

So to me this clearly indicates some serious misconfiguration but then again, I'm no mail guru (yet ).

Does anyone have a clue why he can receive emails with such a setup and more importantly as he can clearly get them, why I get the above error?

Any help, explanation, advice is more than welcome. I'm having a hard time sending quotes over gmail!

Many thanks.
-eco

[uxbod]

Perhaps your client is receiving email from people on the same server ie. his/her colleagues. Without knowing the true domain etc it is impossible to determine where the error lies.