Windows 2008 R2 servers:
- No Active Directory
- All servers are WorkGroup members - not domain members
- No internal DNS servers
- Single NICs
- IIS 7.5
- Each server has its own Windows SMTP Server
These servers send email notifications, through on-server SMTP servers, to our customers when they have activity. We are having some email bounce-backs that are saying they can't resolve the sending server name.
I'm looking at a lot of things - DNS, SMTP, etc. But I'm wondering if it is something as simple as this....
- Does the [system properties][primary dns suffix] on our Windows 2008 servers have anything to do with internet connections?
I believe that this setting only affects intranet connections, and not internet connections - (since it's not a connection level dns suffix that gets set per-connection in the network interface settings).... but I don't want to try to fix something unless I'm sure of all the moving pieces.
Does the [system properties][primary dns suffix] on our Windows 2008 servers have anything to do with internet connections?What's happening here is that the SMTP server is using it's FQDN from the system properties when it identifies itself to external SMTP servers. It's almost a certainty that this FQDN is not a valid FQDN in your public DNS zone and therefore can't be resolved by those external SMTP servers.
What you need to do is to configure the properties of the SMTP virtual server to use a valid FQDN to identify itself and create the appropriate A record for this name in your public DNS zone. Also have your ISP create the appropriate PTR record for the public ip address from which email from your server originates.