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

[Sean McNealy]

Since I'm curious, which one was the problem here?

The MX that pointed to the CNAME:
mail             IN    CNAME   slice1.bronosky.com.
slice1           IN    A       174.143.204.116
bronosky.com.    IN    MX    0 mail.bronosky.com.
(I'm using the the mail CNAME here to make it clearer the difference
from the next one.  For this assume he'd changed the bronosky.com
CNAME into an A.)

Or was it the CNAME that pointed to the MX:
bronosky.com.    IN    CNAME    slice1.bronosky.com.
slice1           IN    A       174.143.204.116
(Where we fall back to using the A record for slice1.bronosky.com as
MX since there isn't an MX for that request!)

-Sean

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 3:27 PM, Richard Bronosky <Richard at bronosky.com> wrote:
> Oops! I didn't copy the "before" records, I retyped them for the sake of
> this email. The first 2 should be:
> bronosky.com.    IN    CNAME   slice1.bronosky.com.
> mail             IN    CNAME   slice1.bronosky.com.
>
> On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 2:43 PM, Sean McNealy <sean.mcnealy at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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 #!.
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Ale mailing list
>> > Ale at ale.org
>> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>> > See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>> >
>> >
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ale mailing list
>> Ale at ale.org
>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>
>
> --
> .!# RichardBronosky #!.
>
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