I've been having intermittent trouble getting mail to Earthlink, and I think that I have narrowed the problem to a DNS issue; specifically, it seems that SIMS is sometimes not picking up the MX records. I've shown two examples below, which are relatively close in time: the first shows the failure mode, the second a successful send. The major difference that seems to BE a difference is highlighted with "<<============". (Note that the following is very wide; open your window to the width of the following line to see the whole thing.)
[ abridged...]
Stop trying to send mail to Earthlink?Does anyone have any idea how to address this issue?
The problem is not you, it's Earthlink. They have both MX and A records for earthlink.net, and both appear to be in a DNS load-balancing scheme with very short TTL's. One risk of such things is that sometimes a nameserver problem can result in records vanishing, and it seems that the MX records for earthlink.net do that fairly often. When they do that, SIMS (properly) falls back to using the A records, but the geniuses at Earthlink seem to be pointing those A records at a totally different set of machines that don't actually accept mail for earthlink.net addresses. I think those are the outbound mail servers, but I'm not really sure.
Unless and until Earthlink improves the robustness of their DNS systems or rethinks how they do DNS load-balancing for mail, this will keep happening. You might be able to encourage that process by contacting Earthlink and explaining that their current DNS setup is causing trouble. They should have heard this before, because it has been a problem for months and seems to have become worse in the last few weeks. You are NOT the only person seeing it.
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Bill Cole
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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