SMTP Banner Check

What you see when your domain has this problem
SMTP Banner Mismatch Details area Ignore

More Information About Smtp Banner Check

The SMTP banner issued by your email server did not contain the hostname we resolved for your server’s IP address.

Additional Information

Email servers answer connections on port 25 with a string of text called an SMTP Banner whose purpose is to announce the server and any information that the administrator would like to convey to the world.

It is best practice to put the name of your server in your SMTP banner so that anybody who connects via your IP Address has a clue as to who they are talking to. You will get this warning if the name you present yourself as is not in the same domain as the hostname we get when we perform a PTR lookup on your IP Address.

For a time many servers would "mask" their SMTP banners by replacing the characters with asterisks to anybody outside of their network. The logic behind this was often that you did not want to broadcast any information about your network to people outside for fear of giving them any information that might help them in an attack against your server. The benefits of doing this are minimal and many servers perform a banner check as part of spam mitigation, so it has a negative cost associated with the practice. Our tool will issue a warning if your banner is masked.

Some receiving mail servers may use a mismatched or masked banner as an indication of a possible spam source in a scoring system, but most will not reject incoming mail solely on this basis.

If you do not have a PTR record, or your record does not match your hostname, we recommend that you contact your ISP and ask them to setup a reverse (PTR) record that matches the hostname of your mail server.

Are you managing your email delivery?

Email delivery is more than running an email server, or regularly checking for blacklists. To really ensure you customers get your email, you need to setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC. If you aren't manage your DMARC configuration and responses from email providers, you don't know if your customers are getting your email.

MxToolbox is YOUR expert on email deliverability. MxDelivery Center can help you setup and analyze your DMARC, DKIM and SPF to give you the insight you need to make email configuration changes and get your emails to your customer's.
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