Email DNS quandry.

[Down2TheC]

Prior to pointing my domain to my VPS nameservers, we had everyone.net free email service set up. So naturally, by pointing the domain here, that was broken. Email would come in and there would be no account by that name on the box.

After researching, I learned a bit about DNS. I entered what was needed into my domain's DNS.

mydomain.com - MX(10) - sitemail.everyone.net (used to be mail.mydomain.com)
and already had...
mail.mydomain.com - A - IP

I would think... (assume by "email" I mean an @domain.com address)
- email from beyond would follow DNS to my name server which would shoot it out to everyone.net.
- email from the server would track out straight out.

But that's not happening. I'm still getting failure notices from my qmail-send saying "This address no longer accepts mail". Just like before the MX change.

Anyone know what I'm missing? The change should be instant, right? That's not cached anywhere that I know of. Do I need to change DNS at the server level too? I even tried bouncing my DNS and email services.
Thanks.

[Pawel Kowalski]

I had mx issues a couple days back. It took about 2 days for them to update properly on some computers. Not sure if its supposed to do that but everything works fine on my end now.

[Down2TheC]

Cool. I'll wait and see then. Email config is such a pain. I hate getting an email in finally and realizing you've made 25 changes since you sent that one. D'oh!

[jason]

Since qmail on your VPS already knows (thinks?) it is authoratative for your domain name it does not do DNS lookups for messages, it just tries to deliver them. So any mail passing through the SMTP server on your VPS for a domain hosted there will be delivered locally, mail originating on other servers will be delivered to everyone.net.

I believe there is a setting in qmail to tell it not to handle the domain locally, but I'm not sure what it is off the top of my head.

--Jason

[Down2TheC]

Ooh! I've seen that I think.

Hmmm. Not quite. Under DNS prefs I have "Allow recursion" with options of "Any host", "Localnets", and "Localhost".

It's on the default "Localnets".

Doesn't sound like what you referred to. Time for some more google training. Perhaps there's something in a conf file somewhere the Plesk doesn't address.

Alternate thought... By your theory, if I sent the outgoing mail to another SMTP server, the email coming from my forum would go to the right place. Maybe JPC will let me use a shared SMTP. But the external mail is still not going anywhere (or coming back rejected) so that's only half the battle. Maybe with time.

Thx

[Down2TheC]

I believe there is a setting in qmail to tell it not to handle the domain locally, but I'm not sure what it is off the top of my head.

--Jason

Well, you're right. DNS propagated and outside emails get to the destination now. Inside is still busted. With years of outdated qmail info out there, I found what used to be the solution, but not what the newer method is with the recent qmail versions. There was a simple file to edit but it no longer exists. Every current process involves local accounts.

If I find the solution I'll be sure to share. If not I'll just hack my phpBB to send the domain.com email to an offsite SMTP service.

[Pawel Kowalski]

Whats the error you get when sending outgoing mail?