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Old 3 Feb 2017, 08:02 AM   #59
jhollington
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 371
It's remotely possible that could be part of it if the issue that Comcast is having is the DNS resolution, which we can't entirely rule out; although I'm not seeing any specific DNS-related problems flagged by the usual testing tools, that doesn't mean that Comcast's mail servers may not be specifically having a problem resolving names from Freehostia's servers. It's one of several possibilities that would explain the symptoms we're seeing, as a DNS/MX record lookup failure usually results in a transient error rather than a permanent one.

However, the problem is the anthonytonini.com domain, not the tonytonini.com one. Unless you're talking about doing a separate test of sending e-mail messages to tonytonini.com, changing the DNS for that isn't going to make a difference at all — in fact that's not even part of the equation right now if you're sending from your Comcast.net address via webmail. I'd recommend leaving it out of the equation just to avoid complicating things further.

If you're able and willing to, however, it might be worth moving your anthonytonini.com DNS hosting over to GoDaddy or another provider and leaving the MX record pointing to mbox.freehostia.com. That would eliminate the possibility of a DNS resolution problem, since we know that e-mails to GoDaddy are getting through without issues.

Quote:
I also noticed one thing: When I did a tracert on anthonytonini.com AND tonytonini.com, the last line of the tracert ended with the word "liquidnet" in it; now it's gone. Don't know if that's a clue that something changed or not. I was in IT 20 years ago and I should know this.
Well, I'm not sure what it looked like before, but really it's the IP address we're concerned about. The "Liquidnet" reference is presumably just the reverse DNS (PTR) lookup of that IP address, which currently doesn't resolve to anything. I don't know if the PTR record got dropped, or the A record for anthonytonini.com changed.

Actually, looking more closely at the PTR queries, reverse lookups for both of those IP addresses are returning NXDOMAIN errors, which suggests that the DNS servers that provide reverse address lookup are down or otherwise broken. This seems like a more recent development, however — possibly only something that's broken today, in fact, as when I did a reverse DNS lookup for Freehostia's MX record yesterday afternoon (as per my post from around 2:12 PM) it was responding just fine, and that one is also returning NXDOMAIN now as well (which makes sense, as it's on the same subnet, and therefore would have the same DNS server).

Code:
; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> ptr 162.210.102.233
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 41532
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;162.210.102.233.		IN	PTR

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
.			86341	IN	SOA	a.root-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 2017020202 1800 900 604800 86400

; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> ptr 162.210.102.199
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 3362
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;162.210.102.199.		IN	PTR

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
.			86393	IN	SOA	a.root-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 2017020202 1800 900 604800 86400

Last edited by jhollington : 3 Feb 2017 at 08:07 AM.
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