Hallo,

am new in this forum, but hope to participate regularly.

I currently ran into a strange problem, which I have difficulties to explain.

One of our clients have an email domain like company.com.xx where xx is the country code.

Since we are unhappy with our local provider, we recently moved that domain to a provider in the US.

The US provider setup new MX records and most DNS queries resolve correctly to these new MX records.

However, sometimes the query resolves to the old IP addresses.

The mail server has the hostname company.com.xx which is the same as the email domain name. I know that this does not make sense but this is how it is configured.

The mail server also is connected to the Internet with two public IPs. Again, I know that is not good, but that is how they have it currently.

Now my theory is that if a DNS query resolves the MX record for company.com.xx correctly the mail are delivered to mail hoster in the US, which is how it should be. However, if the MX record for company.com.xx cannot be resolved, the DNS query looks for the A reord of company.com.xx and then delivers to the public IPs connected to the server. Which has as hostname company.com.xx.

What I would like to know, does my theory make sense? Is that how it could be? How can I confirm this?

Thanks a lot for your commments.

bruce

not sure when you republished your new MX, A records, but it obviously takes a finite amount of time for new records to propagate... theres a lot peer and local DNS servers across the globe to update...

Did you transfer the domain correctly? possilbly, check with the previous hosting services, registar, etc to make sure they are NOT still "hosting" or holding any of the domain records.

P2E

thanks for your reply.

acutally the transfer was done months ago, but I also suspect that the provider is still having an entry in the DNS.

You have to be sure that whoever is taking care of your DNS settings that they have the appropriate records for whoever is hosting the domain. Let's say for example that the domain was registered through godaddy.com, but your DNS records are being handled by Company A. You need to make sure that Company A has the same records that godaddy.com has (MX, A, CName, etc), otherwise your stuff will break.