[PLUG] [Solved] eMail Delivery/Domain Name Problem

[Casey Bralla <MailList@nerdworld.org>]

Thanks to all for the excellent comments and suggestions.  I have been able to 
solve this problem (actually, figuring out a work-around).

The problem does seem to be a "stale glue" record being held and propagated by 
Register.com.  When I first registered my domain with them 8 or 9 years ago, I 
needed a glue record because I was running my own DNS server on the registered 
domain.  For the past 5+ years, however, I've been using a separate DNS for my 
main domain on ZoneEdit, so no longer need the glue record.  

This glue record does change -somehow-, since the 2 IP Addresses from the glue 
record were ones I had been using 3 years ago and 8 years ago.   The people at 
Register.com were pleasant, but were unable to even see the glue record, so 
could offer no solutions.  They claimed there is no way to change or flush 
glue records.  (I doubt this, but that's what their "award winning telephone 
support" group says.)

The fix I came up with was to create 2 new DNS server names (both of which 
point to my single IP address), and change the effected domain to use these 2 
new server addresses for DNS.  Since these are brand new, there is no glue 
record for them.

dig now returns the actual URLs for the new server names (no glue records), 
and eMail from Yahoo & gmail get through almost immediately..



BTW, Rich Kulaweic made an excellent point about making sure that an outgoing 
mail servers have an domain name that matches the reverse IP lookup.  Any 
server that does not have this risks having eMail simply dropped as potential 
spam.  Since I run my own servers, and have a "non-dedicated" IP, my IP 
reverse-lookup retrieves a comcast name.  Luckily, comcast allows their 
commercial customers to relay through their eMail server, so my outbound 
eMails all get through.


Second BTW, I had resisted using the lower cost "Go Daddy" registrar because I 
thought they weren't too serious.  But with this problem with Register.com 
(which they were completely unable to even understand), maybe I need to re-
examine how good Register.com is at providing DNS services.




On Thursday 06 January 2011 9:59:02 pm Darren Nickerson wrote:
> 
> 
> The problem is in the dns1.nerdworld.org and dns2 records above in bold ...
> these are called glue records and it could be you have changed them
> recently and they have not propagated yet, or it could be you need to fix
> your DNS for nerdworld.org, because they don't match the information we
> saw earlier, and they also don't respond:
> 
> 
> On Jan 6, 2011, at 7:42 PM, Casey Bralla wrote:
> > 
> > __SOME__ people (notably yahoo) cannot send eMail to anyone at this
> > domain. It times out with a "domain not known" error:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > I've done diagnostics on the setup and everything seems fine.  This the
> > same system I use from multiple other domains, and have never had a
> > problem.
>

-- 

Casey Bralla
Chief Nerd in Residence
The NerdWorld Organisation
http://www.NerdWorld.org
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