Why do I need a dot at the end of my lookup?

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

However, if you add a dot to the end of the query, the problem goes away.
So I am assuming the server is trying to qualify each request, even though
itis qualified.
It's the client that is doing this, and it is doing it because the name is
not fully qualified.  You don't understand what fully qualified is[1]. 
Thereare - alas! - a lot of people who promulgate the erroneous idea that
"has multiple labels" is the same as "is fully qualified".  (The most common
promoters of this false idea are the writers of MTS documentation.  The
Postfix documentation makes this error in numerous places[2], for example.) 
The former is not the same as the latter.  A fully qualified domain name can
quite easily have just one label (as localhost. does, for example), and a
name with multiple labels is not necessarily fully qualified.


How do I rectify this?
You learn what the actual definition of "fully qualified" is.


--- Links ---
   1 http://menandmice.com./online_docs_and_faq/glossary/fqdn.htm
   2 http://www.postfix.org./postconf.5.html#non_fqdn_reject_code