Hyphen in domain name

[Kevin Darcy]

Farid Hamjavar wrote:

> On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Ashish Kumar Batwara wrote:
>
> > Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2000 11:38:11 -0700
> > From: Ashish Kumar Batwara <akbatwara at mirapoint.com>
> > To: bind-users at isc.org
> > Subject: Hyphen in domain name
> >
> > Hello,
> > Could anybody tell me that Windows NT DNS server is able to resolve the
> > hyphen in domain names???
> > I hv some domains with hyphen in the domain name... When i m trying to
> > send mails to the user in those domain, it is trying , but after some
> > time.. it is saying that Max. number of trials reached & mails get
> > bounce back.....
>
> What ,perhaps, that message ("Max. number of trials reached")
> means is that max number of hops has been reached.
> I am talking about udp or tcp TTL values in
> any operating system. You may want to run traceroute
> against the destination to which you're trying to send email
> to see if it goes ok.

I wouldn't expect the word "trial" to be used to mean "hop", but even if it
were, I doubt very much that a single "TTL exceeded" SMTP connection failure
would cause a mail message to be bounced. All reasonable MTA's deal with
connection failures by retrying the message, since these are considered
transient errors. If "trials" == "hops", I think it is far more likely that
"max. number of trials reached" is the MTA's version of sendmail's "hop
count exceeded", i.e. crude loop detection based on the number of
Received: headers on the message.

I think, even more likely than either of these possibilities, though, that
"trials" == "retries", i.e. the MTA reached some fixed retry threshold and
gave up on the message.

As for the root cause, who knows? It may be DNS-related, it may not. Without
more information on the failure, one can only speculate...


- Kevin