Hello people.

I'm on the verge of shifting hosts for my domain. I'm going to be maintaining my own DNS and mailserver.

Anyway, I haven't made any changes at my domain registrar yet. Before I do, I need to make sure that the new MX record on the DNS I'm going to maintain works right. So this is what I did:

From a linux box running sendmail, made the only nameserver available in resolv.conf as the one I'm going to use for my domain. Then I used the command

mail -s testing postmaster@mydomain.com <test.file

well, the mail still goes to the old mailserver - any idea why? The nameserver I'm using in resolv.conf reports itself as the SOA for my domain, with the MX record pointing to the new mailserver I intend to use. Any ideas??

Thanks

If you run:
dig mydomain.com mx

Does it return the correct A record?

If you run a dig on that A record (as shown from the mx dig) - ie:
dig mail.mydomain.com A

Does it resolve to the correct IP?

Depending on the distro you are using nscd may also be in use - try stopping it and try again:
service nscd stop

the ms dig returns the correct A and mx records for the Mail eXchanger.

and nscd isn't running on either the linux box at my lab or the DNS on trhe internet..

so why are the root servers being queried?? That's the only way that sendmail on my local box would be able to send mail to the old hosting provider..

if I goto dnsreport.com, it and test the domain to be shifted - well, I get the same things as my own digs there - the mx section for my domain turns out to be just fine!!

I can't understand it.

Do you have the A address listed in your hosts file?

no it's not in /etc/hosts - but how does that matter??

Well, if you had a previous entry in /ec/hosts pointing to the real server it would use that before doing a dns lookup.

Do you have sendmail configured to use a relay for all mail?

nope - no mail relaying - sendmail connects directly to the mail exchanger of the domain in question.... :X

is it possible that bind is running on your test host and the cache needs to be flushed?

tom

If you look at the message headers of the message that ended up on the production box does it show the message being received by the new box? Maybe the new box just received it and relayed it to the production box.

well, when I asked sendmail to do relaying through the mail exchanger I WANT mail to go to - mail went fine to the domain I want to test for!! But when I stop the relaying and say send mail directly in sendmail.mc, the trouble starts again..

And yes - I think that maybe the DNS cache on the nameservers I'm using need to be flushed - yes, I am using bind 9.

????

Well yeah, I don't know what happened - but the SAME setup which wasn't working is working now - I guess it was a matter of the BIND cache being updated after a while on the test host.

thanks people!!

Now mail is being delivered to the right mailserver using the DNS which is SOA for that domain.