In similar circumstances, I had the same problem with IMail and SimpleDNS Plus; of the two, I narrowed it down to just IMail being broken, i.e. that IMail would try to deliver to secondary MX records of it's own accord.
I would see long delivery times, for example to HotMail & MSN to name names. My answer for the few domains that a) had a malfunctioning MX (primary too!) b) which suffered long delivery times (or no delivery) that I would create a dummy DNS zone in SimpleDNS Plus and hardcode the records that worked. You would think that this would create more work for me, as when the destination changes their mail configuration, my hardcoded records would be responsible for a new mail failure. Well, that'd be true, but in practice these broken domains seldom made changes, so in 2 years this rarely came up. If you have a lite version of Simple DNS Plus, you'll probably want to create some kind of counterweight for them so that you are more likely to accept mail from them. This is because the number of zones you create is limited by your lite version, and creating both the forward and reverse lookup zone would count as 2 zones. Andrew 8) p.s. Since moving to using IIS for my outbound mail handling, I haven't needed to use any of this sort of "cheat". p.p.s. At least one outsourced\disaster-recovery mail provider suggests that you configure your DNS to make them the highest cost MX record, and they return a 421 response until you tell them to "turn on" mail handling and webmail for your domain. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Erik Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2005 10:17 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Imail / DNS / and 2nd MX records Thanks.... So do would need to make a change to our DNS cache - to expire sooner? It is just strange that it is only happening on this domain (as far as we are aware). And the only reason we are aware of it is that domain has a second MX that does not accept email; so it's being returned to sender. Erik -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sanford Whiteman Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2005 7:04 PM To: Erik Subject: Re: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Imail / DNS / and 2nd MX records > Sometimes, our DNS server wants to use their 2 MX record even though > that domain has properly configured priority numbers and their > primary server is active. "Use" the secondary, if it's the only MX record IMail ever sees = perfectly valid for IMail, broken in DNS. "Use" the secondary, even if the primary MX record was returned to IMail = broken for Imail, valid for DNS. > The problem when it does resolve to their 2 MX record, is that server > does not except email. i.e., their server is broken, and they're showing it off. > Our caching in Imail has been turned off for years. So the problem > may be in our DNS Server (Simple DNS Plus) where it's not retrying > to get the MX record again; but rather using it's cache. The cache should contain all MX records that were originally returned. It's not one-at-a-time. > Sometimes our DNS does pull the primary MX, other times the 2 MX. i.e., your DNS server is _also_ broken. > Is this a problem with our DNS? Or does DNS pull any MX it finds (no > matter the priority?) It must pull all valid MXes -- how else would it be able to retry? --Sandy ------------------------------------ Sanford Whiteman, Chief Technologist Broadleaf Systems, a division of Cypress Integrated Systems, Inc. e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SpamAssassin plugs into Declude! http://www.mailmage.com/products/software/freeutils/SPAMC32/download/rel ease / Defuse Dictionary Attacks: Turn Exchange or IMail mailboxes into IMail Aliases! http://www.mailmage.com/products/software/freeutils/exchange2aliases/dow nloa d/release/ http://www.mailmage.com/products/software/freeutils/ldap2aliases/downloa d/re lease/ --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com. --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com. --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
