Hi all,

I have a quite funky situation and I think we can manage it if I can pull (with your help) this one off.

I have a DNS server as a master for our Domain(running bind), from there everything goes down, DNSs for subdomains and AD forrests, websites, demosites, etc...

Now I have on a different location an Asterisk, I want to make it send the voicemail messages, and I have succeded, now here is the problem.

The asterisk and the mail server are on different locations, for reasons beyond my control I cannot force the mail server to relay on the machine that the asterisk is running so when the mail server does a reverse lookup it bounces the voicemail mails.

Now if I make the asterisk send it to another address that is not in the same domain, there is no problem.

What I want to do, if possible is to create a subdomain on the DNS server with an specific and for this subdomain only MX record.

In other words:

Create a A record such as pbx.mydomain.com.
Create an MX record that answers only for pbx.mydomain.com, I know it sounds funky but seems to be the only option besides getting a new domain.

Any ideas, thoughts or confirmation about the imposibility of this are welcome.
I spent some time trying to figure it out but with no luck, and honestly I doubt it can be done but I rather have the community to confirm this hunch


Thanks so much.

I think you're way off in space on this one. It is not at all a DNS problem. I've been receiving asterisk emails on my qmail system since 2004 without issue. I didn't configure the asterisk box, but I did configure the qmail box.

The asterisk box was configured with a username/password on the mail server. The asterisk box was told to use that username and password to send every email through the mail server, which is does. Earlier, before I build the mail server, the asterisk box ran its own exim mail server, and mailed out that way. That sounds like your current config. All you'd need to do to receive those emails is to add the asterisk servers' info into the whitelist for your spam checker. Most mail servers allow you to say, "any mail from this server is good, do not treat as spam." Also, you should be able to set your mail server to automatically relay mail for specific IP addresses. Tell your mail server to relay all mail coming from the real world IP of the asterisk, and again the problem will be solved.

On the DNS side, you can easily create a subdomain (pbx.mydomain.com) with its own zonefile (identified in named.conf) and its own MX record. That is easy to do, but again, the problem is not a DNS one, it is poorly configured mail servers.

Peace,
JimBass