MX records and such

[Trevor Smith]

On Thu, 03 Aug 2000 01:40:13 +0200 (CDT), Alexander Sarras wrote:

>Well, "didn't have a clue" for me difinitly covers not even realizing that
>there's something to find out. And frankly, and ISP's tech support who
>doesn't know about mail-basics isn't what I'd call encouraging.

No, they aren't encouraging. What I found most greivous about her
attitude (the original tech support person in question) was that I
said, "I can't send email through your SMTP server to a domain which
I happen to own which is hosted in the states." and she said, "we
only support our own network."

I said, "duh, ok but can *you* send mail through your SMTP server to
that domain?"

"Just a sec. Yep. Oh wait, no it's not going."

(The symptom was not bounced messages but an absolute refusal by the
SMTP server to even process for sending, a message with
'@haligonian.com' in it.)

"OK," says I, "good. We know the problem isn't on my machine. Now why
might your SMTP server not be able to send to a particular domain?"

"Oh, I don't know. We only support our own network."

So much for the _Inter_net. :-) In there somewhere I said, "yeah
alright but I get this error here about failed MX record lookups,
what's that?" and she said she had no idea.

Frankly I can live with a little ignorance (I'm clearly not the most
knowledgeable person on the planet) but I was utterly frustrated with
the refusal to admit that the inability to contact another part of
the Internet was a serious problem worth investigating. I mean the
girl's SMTP server was refusing to send a message and she didn't even
care!

For those interested, I noticed that the nameservers listed with
Internic for my domain, haligonian.com, were unreachable so I changed
them (a dead simple task, nearly instantaneously accomplished thanks
to a great registrar, unlike the mindbendingly obtuse procedure to do
so with Network Solutions, one of the worst companies -- and THE
worst registrar -- on the planet to deal with).

Once this change was done it seemed the problem was fixed. Then I
noticed that every day or so, a very similar problem recurs; I can
not send mail with @haligonian.com in the From: field through my
ISP's SMTP server. However, I think I've noticed that if I first send
a message through my ISP's SMPT server with @haligonian.com in the
To: field, but NOT in the From: field, the jam gets cleared.

Rebooting does not make the problem reappear, it just seems to
reappear randomly.

Shrug.


-- 
 Trevor Smith          |          trevor@haligonian.com
 PGP public key available at: www.haligonian.com/trevor