Stale MX Records

[Kevin Darcy]

My guess is that the mail messages are from braindead mailers that don't
understand MX records, or for some extraterrestrial reason attempt delivery to
the A record *before* doing the MX lookup (in direct violation of RFC 2821).
The A record for firespout.com still points at CIHost, thus explaining why mail
is showing up there. I think if you examine the headers carefully you'll also
find that only *certain* mail software suffers from this particular form of
brain-damage.

The other question is:
WHY ON EARTH DO WEB HOSTING COMPANIES ACCEPT MAIL ON WEBSERVERS? This is a
common malady. Complain to CIHost about it. There should be a strict separation
between web and mail services, for reasons like this.

BTW, your domain has a lame delegation to dns1.nhvt.net. You should fix that.

Also, there are a couple of questionable things in the zone file you show
below: did you really mean to define an A record for firespout.firespout.com
and a TXT record for firespout.com.firespout.com? Those names look pretty goofy
to me...


- Kevin

Kris Haight wrote:

> Hello All-
>
> I hope someone can help me with this issue since I am totally going buggy
> over this. Let me explain my story.
>
> The company I work for was founded in June of 2000 and they had their mail,
> web, and DNS hosted at a company called CIHost in Dallas, TX. In late July
> the DNS service was moved to our new Microsoft Exchange Service Provider
> (called MI8 Corporation), so MI8 could manage the MX records. BUT we kept
> our web addresses pointing to CIhost.
>
> In April of this year, I finally built a name server for our office after
> getting on to our new T1 connection and moved our firespout.com domain (our
> company domain) to the local name server. Well ever since then it seems like
> we've been having problems with stale MX records that keep pointing to
> CIhost. I didnt change anything when I moved the domain from MI8 to CIhost,
> but its still spitting out stale DNS sometimes.
>
> I've tried to change the refresh rate and the serial several times but it
> doesnt seem to take. What's weird about it is that I can query almost any
> DNS server on the Internet and get the correct MX record, however some of
> our mail still goes CIhost. I'm complete boggled, yet I am convinced that
> its a DNS issue.
>
> Here's my information about my server and stuff.
>
> Bind Version: 8.2.3
> Name Server: voon.fs.mindsprung.net
> Domain: firespout.com
>
> My firespout.com database file is located at the bottom of this email.
>
> I'd like any help or suggestions you may have.
>
> Thanks in Advance
>
> Kris Haight
> Systems Administrator
> FireSpout, Inc.
>
> ------------------------
>
> $TTL 3600
> @               IN      SOA     voon.fs.mindsprung.net. it.firespout.com. (
>                         2001060501 ; serial
>                         3600 ; refresh
>                         1800 ; retry
>                         604800 ; expire
>                         3600 ; default_ttl
>                         )
> @               IN      NS      voon.fs.mindsprung.net.
> @               IN      NS      ns.mindsprung.net.
> @               IN      MX      10      mail.mi8.com.
> @               IN      MX      20      nycexbh01.mi8.com.
> @               IN      A       63.249.177.158
> localhost       IN      A       127.0.0.1
> firespout.com   IN      TXT     "FireSpout Domains, NIC Handle: FDD144"
>
> ns1                     IN      A       199.103.224.130
> ns2                     IN      A       208.176.94.126
> mail                    IN      CNAME   mail.mi8.com.
> pop                     IN      CNAME   mail.mi8.com.
> www                     IN      A       63.249.177.158
> voon                    IN      A       199.103.224.130
> ;firespout              IN      A       140.239.167.10
> firespout               IN      A       63.249.177.158