MX records and such

[Darrell Shandrow]

Hi Trevor,

Sounds complicated, but the tech you spoke with should certainly have
been able to escalate the matter to their network administration, who
should be able to diagnose and resolve the problem, if it is, in fact,
on their side.  If not, they should be able to give you some idea
what's going on.

Unfortunately, these days, Internet service providers tend to hire
techs who really aren't qualified for their positions.  

Regards.
On Wed, 02 Aug 2000 22:49:48 -0300, Trevor Smith wrote:

>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
>
>
>
>
>