I'm absolutely infuriated by this. Can someone help me please?

I have a paricular domain which has been configured to use Google Apps for Email.

The problem is that one of my servers will not send email to the domain, and for the life of me I can't figure out why.

The initial problem was a "can't_establish_an_smtp_connection", which a lot of Google searching came back with the suggestion of "Don't have a CNAME pointing domain.tld to ghs.google.com".

This seemed odd to me as none of the MX records involved any CNAMES. In addition, it was only this server that was having problems. Nobody else and none of my other servers were haveing problems sending to it.

I had loads of CNAMES pointing to ghs.google.com, including mail. calendar. start. and www. though.

So I removed them all except start.

And now it gets really interesting!

On sending a new test message, the error I now get is "qmail: 1322742921.154306 delivery 11294: failure: Sorry,_I_couldn't_find_any_host_named_mail.domain.tld._(#5.1.2)/ "

mail.domain.tld??????? WTF? There is, and never was, an MX record pointing to mail.domain.tld
It DOES explain why I was getting the original error -- my server was trying to send email to mail.domain.tld which was a CNAME pointing to ghs.google.com which is the incorrect address.

But WHY?

Here is the current record, in full:



Doing a dig @localhost domain.tld MX (and also without @localhost) gives me the correct MX records. I've checked both my namservers. They both give the correct MX records.

What in the blazes could be causing my system to try to send to mail. ?

The only place mail. exists is within Google Apps control panel config. In there there is an option to configure the address of the page people need to go to to login to email. I've set that to mail.domain.tld in the past, and Google then tells me to add a CNAME pointing mail.domain.tld to ghs.google.com

What really, really, really infuriates me is that I can send email fine from any of my other servers. It is just this particular one that insists on getting it wrong in this mysterious way.

I've checked /var/named/run-root/var for stray records. Nothing.

It is configured to forward DNS requests to the opendns servers. So I checked if those were giving bogus results for some reason. Nope. All well.

So where in the heck is this server getting these mad results from?

This has been happening for over a year now and I've only just got round to worrying about it. The server has been rebooted god knows how many times in the meantime, so it is not a cache problem.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Faris

AHA! Got it!

Why has it taken me a year to figure this out?

It is very simple really. This particular machine has automatically generated smtproutes, pointing to mail.domain.tld and of course my problem domain.tld was one of the ones in the list.

D'oh!