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Qmail Cname and deliverability issues

For some reason, since about 3 or 4 weeks ago, my domain (aws.com) receives email from Yahoo, Juno, etc. (qmail users) about 10% of the time. The rest of the emails get kicked back with:

CNAME lookup failed temporarily. (#4.4.3)
I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

Note that I have pretty much narrowed this down to only services that use Qmail.

Our DNS servers and MX records are all good. We've had it verified by 3 third party vendors.

DNS response times average 4 ms and the payload is around 250 or so bytes.

I have opened a ticket with Yahoo, but they seem to have no answer. Juno is blaming my DNS. I blame Qmail.

Any and all advice is welcomed. As you can imagine, this is quite frustrating.

thanks,
joe

shauncroucher

I tried querying for your namservers and it took 3 or 4 nslookup queries for the results to be returned. That's not a good sign.

Clarify with weatherbug.com that they aren't having any load issues on the DNS servers.

Shaun

awsnoc

ASKER

Hi Shaun. Can you try again? I had rebooted one of our DNS servers in hopes that that might rememdy the problem.

Thanks!
joe

awsnoc

ASKER

Sorry Shaun, but can you tell me if you are hitting a particular NS and if so, which one took the retries?

thx,
joe

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shauncroucher

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Daniel McAllister

Use the site http://www.intodns.com to test your DNS servers... it will also check the MX records on there...

My best guess from what you've said is that your MX records are pointers to CNAME records (instead of A records, as required -- or at least strongly urged).

If you suspect this is a QMail issue, look at what DNS service your QMail server is using (the contents of /etc/resolv.conf).

Good Luck!

Dan
IT4SOHO

awsnoc

ASKER

I removed ipw.aws.com and that fixed the problem. It still makes no sense, as Qmail was the only email MTA affected, but hey, now it works!