Re: General DNS config questions

On May 29, 10:20 am, Max C <maxc...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
OK, here's the deal. For the past several months our company has been
receiving a LOT of delayed emails. Some by a few hours some by a few
days. As you can guess, this is a serious problem. I've tried
several things to resolve this situation:

1 - call our ISP, who was taking care of DNS for us at the time. They
said they'd heard of others having the same issue, but that the DNS
records for our domains were configured properly.

2 - take control of our DNS records by moving them to GoDaddy and
setting the records up myself.

3 - put a sniffer between our ISP's router and our firewall to confirm
that delayed emails are *really* not making it to our network. (Turns
out, about 20 to 30% of hotmail emails always get delayed coming to
any of our domains, so sending a batch of 10 or 20 emails from hotmail
to one of our domains allowed me to see the raw data coming in through
the sniffer. There is no doubt that the emails that were delayed
coming in to a user's inbox did *not* make it to our network. Also,
interestingly enough, nearly 100% of emails from gmail make it through
without delay. I've tried this hotmail and gmail test with groups of
10 to 20 single emails dozens of times. Gmail is always on time and
hotmail always has 20 to 30% delays.)

4 - purchase a separate DSL line, ran it through our firewall and
pointed one of our domain names' MX record to the DSL line's IP info.
Hotmail emails to that domain name on the new DSL line were still
delayed.

So, as a last ditch effort, I thought it wouldn't hurt to post our DNS
record info to get some advice. I'm the first to admit that DNS is
not one of my strong points. Any advice on changes would be
appreciated.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
A records
Host Points To
@ WWW.XXX.YYY.37
mail WWW.XXX.YYY.37
exchange WWW.XXX.YYY.37
www WWW.XXX.YYY.36
ts2 WWW.XXX.YYY.42

CNAMES (Aliases)
Host Points To
smtp @
ts ts2
ftp @

MX (Mail Exchange)
Priority Host Goes To
0 @ mail

TXT (Text)
Host TXT Value
@ v=spf1 a mx ptr ~all
_____________________________________________________________________________________

I read earlier today that @ should point to my web server (WWW.XXX.YYY.
36) instead of my exchange server (WWW.XXX.YYY.37) and that www should
be a cname pointing to @. Could that be causing emails delays? I
tried making that change on one of our unused domain names, but then I
didn't receive emails at all.

Thanks for any insight at all.
Max.

To add to my above config, I use godaddy.com for DNS config. Here's
something I've been playing around with:

I changed the following records as such:

A Records
Host Points To
@ WWW.XXX.YYY.36 (web server)
mail WWW.XXX.YYY.37 (exchange server)
exchange WWW.XXX.YYY.37 (exchange server)


CNAMES (Aliases)
Host Points To
www @


MX (Mail Exchange)
Priority Host Goes To
0 @ mail (A Record for exchange server)
________________________________________________________________________

GoDaddy.com says that "@" simply refers to the domain name in
question. So, I thought "maybe it would be OK to have the A record
for @ pointing to the web server (WWW.XXX.YYY.36) and then a MX record
for "@" pointing to the exchange server (WWW.XXX.YYY.37)

It would appear that line of thinking was incorrect. When I set up my
test domain as above, I could not receive emails to that test domain.

Thanks for reading again.
Max.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: General DNS config questions
    ... change your SPF record to not include "a" however. ... and "www" resolvable in DNS you allow visitors to get to your website by typing either "domain.com" or "www.domain.com" in their browser's address bar. ... Once you've got your DNS squared away, and since it looks like you're using Exchange, you might want to repost this to one of the Exchange newsgroups so we can get some more Exchange expertise on this issue. ... >> receiving a LOT of delayed emails. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.dns)
  • Re: General DNS config questions
    ... I don't think your delayed mail issue is DNS related though. ... Do you have this problem with any domains OTHER than Hotmail? ... that delayed emails are *really* not making it to our network. ... MX (Mail Exchange) ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.dns)
  • Re: using exchange 2003 without a smarthost
    ... > When you send a message and I assume it sits in the queue, ... > Unable to bind to destination server in DNS ... > The receiving server dropped the connection because of a rule. ... >> emails however had a problem until I enabled a smarthost wtih my ISP. ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.admin)
  • RE: mail relay problems setting up
    ... I have switched back to Use DNS to route to each address space on this ... > send emails successfully using DNS. ... > this methord (Use DNS to route to each address space on this connector) for ... > emails to the smart host due to authentication issue. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Outlook Emails with exchange slow in delivery
    ... not using the POP3 connector to bring those emails down to the Exchange ... server and distributing them, ... it could be a DNS issue if your web host is a different set of DNS ... their pop account setting are on the local machine and not ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
Loading