[Sysadmin] evolt dns: bad mx

[David Kaufman]

Hi sysadmins!

Tron used to forward mail addressed to treasurer at evolt.org to me at the address
evolt at gigawatt.com

But today GoDaddy asked me to verify the email address in our whois
record today, so they sent en email to treasurer at evolt.org with a link
for me to click on.

Since I didn't get it, I began to track down why:

host -t mx evolt.org
> evolt.org mail is handled by 10 mail.evolt.org.

host mail.evolt.org
> Host mail.evolt.org not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

hmmm...

so, I sent my own email to treasurer at evolt.org to see if it bounces.
it hasn't (yet)

When your mx is bad, does the sending SMTP server retry for a few days
and then bounce?

I suppose I need to add back the missing dns record for mail.evolt.org,
and point it at tron so the mail forwarding can be restored...

Logged into tron (took a minute to find my old ssh key).  it said:

  No mail.
  Last login: Wed Apr 16 22:35:28 2014  <-- o m g

So FYI:

I found and uncommented the mail.evolt.org CNAME in
/var/cache/bind/dns/org.evolt and pointed it a tron

restarted bind9 and now that's resolving:

host mail.evolt.org
mail.evolt.org is an alias for tron.evolt.org.
tron.evolt.org has address 67.19.208.10

Now i'm trying to remember or figure out how incoming mail is
delivered or in this case forwarded.  I thought it was qmail once upon
a time, but looks like postfix now.  uhhhhm....

-dave