nanog mailing list archives

Re: Is Hotmail in the habit of ignoring MX records?


From: Jimmy Hess <mysidia () gmail com>
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2012 02:38:31 -0500

On 7/26/12, Lou Katz <lou () metron com> wrote:
One of my users has reported incoming mail failures, which I finally
tracked down. It turned out that Hotmail has seen fit to send the mail
to his domain's A record machine, despite the fact that he has valid MX
records.

You looked in the mail headers and saw hotmail's mail server do that,
or the From address/return path just happens to be hotmail?
I would ask for a specific example of a domain name in which that
seems to happen, and  exact DNS zone contents.

I am sure that Hotmail does not  ignore MX in general,  unless they
just broke something; many domains require MX processing and A record
to properly be ignored for mail to be accepted.    But there may be
something else going on with a specific domain or   DNS
queries/responses from its nameservers,  that results in MX being
ignored or unavailable,  resulting in a fallback to 'lookup A'.

An example could be some dns issue such  as slow response to MX query,
 'MX to a CNAME',  'MX to an invalid label that looks like an IP',  MX
DNS response packet too large,
 ....


--
-JH


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