[ale] Why ALE hated my email and how I fixed it

[Richard Bronosky]

I use Gmail. Years ago I switched my personal email server from an IMAP
server that I'd hit with Thunderbird, over to an "alias all incoming mail to
various Gmail accounts" server. It has annoyed me to no end, however, that
when I sent emails as richard at bronosky.com, the headers would indicate that
the email came from Gmail on behalf of my domain address.

Gmail recently added the option to have outgoing email delivered via your
preferred SMTP server. Might I add that this is awesome, generous
(considering all the extra load of connecting out and authenticating against
your closed relay), and selfless (no other free service offers this). When I
made the switch, my emails to ALE started bouncing. First of all I found
that I suffered from
http://status.slicehost.com/2009/11/11/email-issues-spamhaus-pbl and had to
get my IP off of the Spamhaus PBL. But then I still couldn't email ALE and I
also couldn't get password reminders sent to me, or  subscribe new @
bronosky.com aliases via http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale

As it would turn out, I made some choices with my DNS that didn't offend
Google, Yahoo!, Comcast, or AT&T. (They would all deliver to and accept mail
from me.) ALE/Mailman on the other hand would not do either.

My DNS looked like this:
bronosky.com.    IN    CNAME   bronosky.com.
mail             IN    CNAME   bronosky.com.
slice1           IN    A       174.143.204.116
bronosky.com.    IN    MX    0 slice1.bronosky.com.
bronosky.com.    IN    MX    0 bronosky.com.
bronosky.com.    IN    MX    0 mail.bronosky.com.

Mailman kept reporting my email as coming from richard at slice1.bronosky.com,
so it wouldn't accept it since that address wasn't subscribed. What was even
more odd is that when I would request a password reminder from
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale my mail log would register bounces
due to the destination address being the same as above, even though this
address I am now sending from was the one subscribed and the one I entered
in the form. WEIRD!

Turns out that not only is it not advisable to use a cnamed hostname for an
MX record, but Mailman was pretending that they didn't exist. It was as if
the slice1.bronosky.com MX record was the only record in my DNS. When I made
the following change, all was right in the world.

bronosky.com.    IN    A       174.143.204.116
mail             IN    A       174.143.204.116
slice1           IN    A       174.143.204.116
bronosky.com.    IN    MX    0 slice1.bronosky.com.
bronosky.com.    IN    MX    0 bronosky.com.
bronosky.com.    IN    MX    0 mail.bronosky.com.

I'd like to send a big thank you to Jim Kinney for his patient assistance,
emails, watching the logs for me at least three different times, and even
chatting with me over GoogleTalk. I couldn't have done it without him.

-- 
.!# RichardBronosky #!.
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