> TEMPFAIL means exactly what it means, a temporary failure, so the
> message gets rescheduled for another delivery attempt.
>
> This particular situation is very common when a domain has been shut
> down before the expiration date of the domain's registration with
> Internic. The hotmial.com zone was purged from these servers a long
> time ago, so when they get a query for hotmial.com, they know nothing
> about it, so they go to the root nameservers, which then tell them
> that they themselves are indeed authoritative for the zone. Some
> domain name servers will simply fail to return an answer to the query,
> in this situations, and some domain name server will return a
> TEMPFAIL. Either way, DNS resolvers interpret this as a temporary
> failure.
>
> If you were to investigate each one of your problem domains, you will
> reach more or less the same conclusion every time. The response to
> the DNS query either times out, or returns something other than
> NXDOMAIN, so the message gets temporarily bumped.
>
> If a domain really does not exist, the root name servers will return
> NXDOMAIN.
I just wanted to post a thank you personally to everyone who answered
my question (even though in looking back at it I see how it's not a
qmail issue really) and pointing me in the right direction to why I
was seeing what I was seeing.
-Eric Davis
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
