MX Records

Eric Leslie eric.leslie at metzgers.com
Thu Sep 21 00:17:31 UTC 2000


Hello All:
The company that I work for has been having some problems receiving e-mail
recently that has been perplexing me. I am hoping that someone may have some
ideas as to a solution.

The company that I work for is hosting it's website at a virtual host
provider (Webhosting.com), and the domain name is metzgers.com. We have an
in-house Unix box (Cobalt Qube) that houses our mail (both Pop and SMTP). We
are connected to the Internet by a NAT dedicated ISDN line that has 24/7
connectivity. Static IP address is 206.165.56.209 and we have the A name
media.metzgers.com registered to that IP address. Our router passes the
request for POP and SMTP ports to the internal address of our Qube.

The problem that I am having is that mail is delayed from some servers by 24
hours or more. Mail coming from other locations is instant. Some of the
messages I am receiving (people are faxing the failure reports to me) are
Host connect failed - destination host not responding, connection reset, and
read error.

Prior to this week, the MX record pointed to pop.metzgers.com (which is what
the webhosting company uses) instead of media.metzgers.com. Mail still got
here, but we were having problems so we looked into the mx record and
noticed that it was using pop.metzgers.com instead of media.metzgers.com.
Could part of the problem be that when changing pop.metzgers.com
(pop.metzgers.com is no longer setup to anywhere) and some servers have
cached settings?

Internal mail of course works fine and sending mail works fine. As I said,
most mail seems to come through fine also, just not all of it. This is what
stumps me. It is easier to diagnose something when it effects everything,
but difficult when it effects part of the situation.

Here is my MX record, which is maintained by Webhosting.com:
metzgers.com preference = 10, mail exchanger = media.metzgers.com
metzgers.com preference = 0, mail exchanger = media.metzgers.com
metzgers.com nameserver = ns1.dynamicweb.net
metzgers.com nameserver = ns2.dynamicweb.net
media.metzgers.com internet address = 206.165.56.209
ns1.dynamicweb.net internet address = 205.178.159.134
ns2.dynamicweb.net internet address = 205.178.138.137

We don't have a backup mail server as of yet, so is both preferences
required that point to media.metzgers.com? (What is preference=0 used for?
Webhosting.com tells me that it is the timeout value and is required,
although as I do a lookup on other servers, it does not appear that many use
it.) Could that be causing a loop that is delaying the delivery of mail?

Should our MX record read:
metzgers.com preference = 10, mail exchanger = media.metzgers.com
metzgers.com nameserver = ns1.dynamicweb.net
metzgers.com nameserver = ns2.dynamicweb.net
media.metzgers.com internet address = 206.165.56.209
ns1.dynamicweb.net internet address = 205.178.159.134
ns2.dynamicweb.net internet address = 205.178.138.137

Anyway, I am stumped and was hoping that someone would be able to shed some
light into this issue. You know how people can become when they don't get
their e-mail, and they are coming after me :-)


Eric Leslie
InfoSys/New Media
Metzgers Printing & Prepress
________________________________
E-mail: eric.leslie at metzgers.com
Website: www.metzgers.com
Phone: (419) 861-8611
Fax: (419) 861-3299




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