Ok. I guess my question is why does some mail make it and other mail doesn't?
Because your DNS is broken. Some mailservers can work around it, others can not.
If you do an nslookup for www2.aaos.org and md.aaos.org, you will receive an A record. And if an A record suffices, why do I need an MX record?
Because "suffices" really means "to work with poorly designed domains."
Specifically, you're supposed to have MX records to accept mail. That's what MX records do. But, probably to allow mail to be sent to odd domains (such as old hosts that ran mailservers that could accept E-mail), the RFCs state that if you don't have an MX record -- that is, if you don't advertise that you accept E-mail -- mailservers should try sending to your A record. It's a last resort.
Some of the online smpt testers work fine others do not.
What happens here is that a mailserver sending mail to @www2.aaos.org starts by looking up the MX record for www2.aaos.org. The local DNS server doesn't respond. The mailserver then tries a couple more times, perhaps, trying to get a response from the local DNS server. At some point, it gives up.
So either the local mailserver says "Gee, there's no response for queries for the www2.aaos.org domain", *or* the local DNS server says "Gee, there's no response from ns1.winstar.net/ns2.winstar.net for www2.aos.org's MX record, so they won't be responding to requests for the A record."
Nowhere in the RFCs does it account for a situation like yours, where your DNS servers are intentionally dropping packets. The Internet was designed to *work around* dropped packets, but never was it designed for dropped packets to be an intended part of the Internet.
-Scott
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