[lug] OT: Dealing with Unreliable Mail/DNS Servers

[George Sexton]

I have some people that I do admin work that routinely send Email to
other people in Ethiopia. Mail routinely bounces or is delayed. 

At one point I had a big problem with sending because half the time
their DNS servers (which are both on the same network in Ethiopia) are
not available. Because I had Sendmail configured to not accept
unresolvable domains, they would bounce. I did a hack to work around
this.

Clearly the best solution would be for these guys to get a clue and set
up a secondary DNS server with someone on another network (preferably,
one in the US). A secondary MX would be nice also.

Assuming they are too clueless to recognize the need for these DNS
changes, is there anything I can do? I thought of creating my own DNS
zone for them, and configuring one of my mail servers as secondary MX.
Any ideas would be appreciated. 

George Sexton
MH Software, Inc.
Voice: 303 438 9585
http://www.mhsoftware.com