Re: [cobalt-users] mail problem

[Bruce Timberlake <bruce@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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On Mon December 9 2002 18:39, Jeff Lasman wrote:
> Graaf Teil wrote:
> > What is the problem, and how can I fix it?
> > The mx record is on the server and this is in it: mail is sent to
> > the High priority mail server   simpel-internet.com
>
> Can you show us both sides of your mx record?  And are you using an
> A record or a CNAME record for simpel-internet.com?
>
> We've also found that (presuming your hostname for the domain is
> "www") you should have a CNAME record pointing mail for
> www.simpel-internet.com to simpel-internet.com as well.

CNAME's can cause unpredictable results, esp with email on the Cobalts 
(due to the way the 'internal' rewriting tries to happen: mail for 
user@xxxxxxxxxx gets rewritten to user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  If 
host.domain.com is CNAMEd to domain.com, a vicious loop gets set up 
and you get the dreaded 'recursion error').  The official 
recommendation has always been to use A records instead of CNAME.

In this case, would you have 2 MX records? One for 
www.simpel-internet.com pointing to simpel-internet.com, and one for 
simpel-internet.com also pointing to simpel-internet.com?

My personal setup has always been to add one more A record for 
mail.domain.com to my A record list, so I have

domain.com -> ip.ad.re.ss
host.domain.com -> ip.ad.re.ss
mail.domain.com -> ip.ad.re.ss

Then set up MX records for domain.com and host.domain.com to point to 
mail.domain.com.

Added advantage is that if you need to separate mail services onto a 
separate server for some reason, you just modify the mail.domain.com 
A record, and you're done.

Might be wrong, though, and I might just have been lucky all these 
years... :)

- -- 
Bruce Timberlake

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