[lug] Screwed up inbound email

[rm at fabula.de]

On Fri, Jan 11, 2002 at 01:34:53PM -0500, Hugh Brown wrote:
> Here's how to find out where your mail is going
> [nice dig output omited ...] 
> 
> So you find out that the mx record for hardiman.com is
> Lab1a.hardiman.com which has an ip address of 192.168.0.4 which is not
> routed by the Internet at large.  So, all of your email is getting sent
> to the bitbucket in the sky.  ditto for your ns lookups.  

Oh no. It actually gets sent to my print server ;-) If 192.168.0.4 is
a valid and reachable IP in the senders network the MTA will try to
contact it to deliver mail. Since more and more hardware/gadgets support
SMTP you might see some funny results ....
 
> What you need is an internet routeable ip address for the ns record and
> for the mx record, then configure that machine to do the right thing
> with it (forward it to your private lan, ....).

As someone else mentioned, without an MX the MTA will most likely try
to deliver to the IP pointed to by the A record for a given hostname.
An unreachable MX is the worst setup.


 Ralf