From: Alex Satrapa (alex.satrapaapf.edu.au)
Date: Thu Feb 02 2006 - 18:02:22 CST

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On 3 Feb 2006, at 00:36, Victor Duchovni wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 02:18:33PM +0100, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:
>>
>>> and if gives and answer of 0, it would then attempt the A record?
>>
>> Yes.
>> try:
>>
>> ignore_mx_lookup_error = yes
>>
>
> No, don't try this.

Ferengi Rule Of Acquisition #285: No good deed goes unpunished.

One option is simply to treat the failure of the destination domain's
DNS as an indication that they don't want to receive email - what right
do you (as postmaster) have to force mail upon them? The role of a mail
server is to do its best to deliver mail to destinations that wish to
receive those messages - no more, no less.

Just don't deliver email to them, and let your users contact their
users to put a boot up the destination domain's postmaster's bum. Going
out of your way to be nice and do a good deed by delivering the email
to the destination site - despite the DNS server's implicit statement
that they don't want that mail - will either frustrate the receivers
who didn't want that email, or allow the destination domain's
hostmaster to continue to be lazy.

Don't "fix" your mail server to cope with the broken destination
domain. Otherwise you'll spend the rest of your life "fixing" your mail
server to cope with brokenness elsewhere on the Internet, while all
those other sysadmins sit back and munch popcorn congratulating
themselves on having such an easy job. Besides, if you "fix" things by
putting special entries in your server's config files, you have to
track the reason for those entries, and periodically come back to check
that the destination DNS is still broken. If you forget to do this,
you'll end up still sending mail directly to the target host long after
the MX records (on the now-working DNS) say, "no, the mail server is
this way!" Then *your* system will be broken. Shame on you!

Contact the domain administrators and let them know of the problem.
It's their job to fix their system, not yours to work around the
problem. I know I'd expect people to do the same for me.

And remember - no good deed goes unpunished.

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