Website not sending email to own domain

[cmccar]

Hi All,

We are helping a client who has taken on a full time web developer who has built a new site and hosted it with company we don't normally deal with.

The site has email forms which need to be send to the company staff which is not working.

The DNS rests with a seperate hosting company who hosts the email and used to point the MX A record to one of our servers in Dublin which was a Win2K server so that all worked fine.

Now this new company is telling me that they had to set up a DNS record on their system so of course any email sent to the domain will see thier dns settings and not leave thier network.

My question is do they really need to set up a DNS entry for this domain in the first place? When we hosted it on
the win2k box we just added the site to IIS settings and
it all worked fine. Is there something similar in Apache?

Sorry for the long post but any help very much appreciated.

Cormac

 

[mneylon]

There's no technical reason I can think of for them adding a DNS entry or mail configuration record for the domain if the DNS is external to their network.

In many instances the "default" behaviour of the hosting control panel is to add either a dns entry or a mail record for a hosted domain, however it should be possible for them to disable that.

This site, for example, sits on one server while its mail resides somewhere else. There is no issue with mail being sent from the server to my @irishwebmasterforum.com email as the mail server "knows" that it has to send it "offsite"

Hope that helps

 

[cmccar]

Thanks for the input Michele

So in IIS for shared hosting I create an entry which says
when traffic comes to this IP then direct them to this folder(website) based on the domain name. This works regarless of were the DNS details are held, Eircom, Go Daddy ect.

Excuse my lack of the specific technical wording of the above as I just know how to do this and know that it just works on the many occasions we have done it in the past for various projects.

What is the process for Apache?

Why would thse guys feel that they need to create thier own local DNS entry? As you said most control panels should allow you to bypass the need for local DNS.

I expect it is also not good practice to have a competeing DNS entries anyway.

 

[mneylon]

Whether the server is running IIS or Apache shouldn't make any difference, as your issue stems from the mail server on the machine being incorrectly configured and NOT from the web server's ability to send out mail from the site.

For example. If you were to signup for one of our (Blacknight) linux hosting plans the system would automatically assume that mail was being handled on there as well and would modify exim accordingly. HOWEVER it takes about ten seconds to remove the exim (mail server) configuration and send the mail externally.

If nameservers are not authorative (excuse the spelling) for a domain and are not going to be then they should not have records for a domain. Conflicting DNS records break things.
It's not as much of an issue when you are dealing with a small provider, but if we were to put in DNS records for something like gmail.com it would break mail for a lot of people whose mail passes through our systems... You can see where that could lead

If the hosting provider's technical support can't understand how to set things up for you correctly then you should consider changing provider. What you are trying to do is not complicated and they should be able to "make it happen"

 

[cmccar]

Yeah I am a bit annoyed that this operator has not just solved this issue which is very much thiers to deal with.

I'll just have to get on the phone to them again and see if they can give me a clear answer as to why they think they need to fun the Conflicting DNS.

Will post an update in due course.

 

[mneylon]

I'd be interested in finding out what happens