mail delivery problems / MX record issue?

[admjcd]

If you have two mx record and one with a lower cost.  All mail should go to the one with the lower cost unless it is unavailable.  Then the mail would temporarily go to the higher cost record.  Once the lower cost record becomes available the mail should be sent to the lower cost mx record server.  One way for this to happen automatically is by using the etrn command.  The lower cost server would send this command to the higher cost server to retrieve the mail it lost while it was out.  This is a common setup.  

you can telnet to port 25 of the web server and type :

		"ehlo yourdomain.com"

then wait for an answer "220 ready"  and type

		ETRN yourdomain.com

it should reply back with something like "deque-ing mail for your domain"  

this will tell it to send the mail to the lowest cost record.  Also check out http://www.skypoint.com/support/etrn.usage.html  

good luck and reply to me with any questions  I am glad to help.  also I posted a question about DNS if anyone can help please do.  the subject is "Authoritative answer "no data" 50% of the time"

Thanks
 			


-----Original Message-----
From: nospam at home.com [mailto:nospam at home.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 2:01 PM
To: comp-protocols-dns-bind at moderators.isc.org
Subject: Re: mail delivery problems / MX record issue?


On 5 Jun 2001 08:11:09 -0700, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles at skynet.be>
wrote:
>At 1:54 PM +0000 6/5/01, Roger Rabbit wrote:
>
>>  The web server is an offsite machine, hosting probably dozens of
>>  web sites and is something I don't have any control over.
>>  If there's anything I can ask them (hostway.com) to do that wouldn't
>>  affect their other users, please let me know.
>>  The other thought I had was to point the top-level domain to our mail
>>  server and only assign www.epcom.com to the web server.  But then
>>  that would prevent people from accessing the web page via
>>  http://epcom.com/.
>
>	That still wouldn't stop spammers from using it.

What I'll probably do is cron a script to scan the mailbox and try 
to deal with the mail that way.  Either forward it on or send a reply
asking the person to resend the mail to the address that explicitly
contains the mail server's name.  I was hoping there was a more
elegant solution.

>	If you can't get the web hosting company to turn off the mail 
>server listening on port 25, you're screwed.  Unless you want to 
>refuse all mail coming to your mail servers from the web hosting 
>machine, there's simply no way you can stop them.

Actually, the problem is that the web server doesn't forward
mail that it receives and it just arrives there and sits there unread.

>	Oh, and please don't use "NOSPAM" garbage in your return address. 
>The newsgroup you posted this message to is gatewayed to a mailing 
>list, and having this garbage in your address is anti-social and 
>makes it more difficult for people to reply to you with the kind of 
>information you've requested.

I sort of figured this kind of question and reply would be best kept
in the public forum anyway for posterity's sake.

>	Moreover, all address scanning tools I know of are intelligent 
>enough to remove all "NOSPAM" type tags I've ever seen, so it doesn't 
>do any good anyway.
>-- 
>Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

Yeah, unless one's email address isn't contained anywhere in the
message!  Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for the reply.

Roger