DNS and qmail : CNAME failure

[Murray Walker]

Hi all,

I have a problem getting mail delivered to my site cstr.ed.ac.uk from
sites that use qmail - seems to be ok with mail from sendmail, etc
sites.

The problem gets reported to qmail senders as follows:- 

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at hotmail.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following
addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<maw at cstr.ed.ac.uk>:
CNAME lookup failed temporarily. (#4.4.3)
I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

The cname lookups are performed on the MX values which, in turn, are
liddell.cstr.ed.ac.uk and mailrelay.ed.ac.uk which are both actual
addresses, not cname's, so the cname query obviously fails. So why does
qmail screw up? Any ideas? After mailing the qmail discussion list I got
a reply suggesting that our records were > 512 bytes which would caused
qmail to fail. Is this an issue if there are no cname records for those
hosts? If it is, is there a way to reduce the size of the record?

Murray.
-------------
Murray Walker
Computing Officer, Centre for Speech Technology Research,
University of Edinburgh, 80 South Bridge, Edinburgh, EH1 1HN,
Scotland, U.K.

e-mail: maw at cstr.ed.ac.uk
Tel: 0131 650 2804