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

[Sean McNealy]

Maybe it's because I don't know a lot about DNS, but did you make a
CNAME of your domain point to itself?  And if that's what's going on
(and I think someone will probably say why that's not), why?

bronosky.com.    IN    CNAME    bronosky.com.

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 12:35 AM, Richard Bronosky <Richard at bronosky.com> wrote:
> 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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