Hi,

I honestly tried not to tinker with my webserver, but my qmail-send has been broken in some way in the last week. It was workign OK before but now it gives a #5.1.2 error on all addresses I send to, saying it can't find the domain.

Traditionally this error mans you spellt the domain name wrong. But in my case it is giving the same complaint about all email domains, even when spellt well.

Receiving mails is no problem, only sending. I have tried various configurations so I'm thinking that I may have inadvertently changed permissions or deleted or whatever to some file that qmail-send nneds to use. Files that come to mind are resolv.conf and named, I expect qmail might use them. Are they any ther thigns I should check to find the problem out?

Cheers for help

Possibly a DNS lookup error? Can that machine resolve MX records for other domains?

Run this from a terminal:
And part of the output should include:
If none of the output includes that information, then your server can't resolve the MX properly.

Try adding running:
That will force dig to use the OpenDNS name server. If that does work, then it's a problem with the DNS server that your Mail Server is using. If it still doesn't work, then there's a problem with your Mail Server and the way it's doing lookups - maybe a firewall blocking port 53 traffic?

Thanks Fukawi2 for the helpful reply. I'll follow your instructions. Cheers.

Hi Fukawi2,

YEs, it did work if I used the OpenDNS. So it is my nameserver.

Now, as you noticed I said, it WAS working. So while I was rummaging through the pile of BIND documentation, I started getting impatient, and decided I should undo whatever changes I had made. However, I had only made one small change, and it did not have anything to do with mail.

The change I had made was including "recursion no;" close to the top of named.conf, because I was advised to, by www.dnsstuff.com. Well I deleted it again, did a "rndc reload" and suddenly I could send mail again!

I'm glad you knew what you did so you can undo it
Cheers,
-p