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

[Richard Bronosky]

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 <http://bronosky.com/>.
mail             IN    CNAME   slice1.bronosky.com <http://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 #!.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> > See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> >
> >
>
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>



-- 
.!# RichardBronosky #!.
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