Is Hotmail in the habit of ignoring MX records?

Thu Jul 26 17:29:21 UTC 2012

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 09:05:55AM -0500, Ryan Rawdon wrote:
> 
> On Jul 26, 2012, at 2:14 AM, Lou Katz wrote:
> 
> > One of my users has reported incoming mail failures, which I finally
> > tracked down. It turned out that Hotmail has seen fit to send the mail
> > to his domain's A record machine, despite the fact that he has valid MX records.
> > 
> > The A record points to my webserver, which does not normally accept mail
> > for anyone. The mail server MX records are to an entirely different machine.
> > 
> > Comments?
> > 
> > Do I need more valium?
> 
> 
> If you subscribe to http://mailop.org and look in the archives, you'll see a thread named '[mailop] Hotmail ignoring MX, going direct to @ IN A?  ' from March of this year (which carries over into April).  In this thread Mark Foster encounters the same issue, and upon investigation others (including myself) see it as well.
> 

Ahh - I knew I had seen this before, but thought it was here (nanog) rather
than on mailops. I think I may try setting the A record for the domain to
my mailserver, and letting the webserver there redirect the http requests.
I dislike putting a webserver on the unadorned domain, but out there in the
'real' world, folks seem to have become accustomed to leaving off the 'www'.

Thanks for the replies; I'll take this over to mailops if there is any more
to say. The funny thing is that this behavior with respect to Hotmail has not
affected any of the other couple of dozen domains with similar or identical
configurations here.

Oh, well.

-=[L]=-
-- 