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CNAME errors - what can be done about them? Does anyone have experience with eliminating them?

Jeff7

Jeff7

Lifer
Yes, I checked Google already. The best answer I get is that it has something to do with how AOL handles e-mail addresses.

The problem is, I've got one person who uses AOL, but I e-mail him regularly. Some days, there are no problems at all. But maybe once a week, almost all of my e-mails get bounced back, nearly 30 minutes after sending, with the error "CNAME lookup failed temporarily. (#4.4.3)."

My webhost is Gisol.com. I contacted them about it already, and, assuming the tech on the other end actually understood English, which I'm not too confident about, they said that they patched it. The CNAME errors stopped - for about 3 days.

Might there be something in my server settings page that I could change? Is this an AOL problem, something that they'd need to deal with? Why is it intermittent?
 
Why even use CNAMES? CNAMES done incorrectly can result in mail delivery failure. I never use them. It's generally just as easy to create Host "A" records for each resource. For a typical web and mail site there's only six or so host records.
 
As far as I know, I'm not using any custom names. I just e-mail "person@aol.com," where "person" is just his username. (without the quotes, obviously)
If that's even what you're referring to, because I'm still not entirely sure what a "CNAME" or "custom name" really is.
 
CNAME (Cannonical name) has to do with the public DNS records for a domain. It's an alias for an "A" record (Host Name). What your error messages are saying is that one of Domains you are working with has errors in its DNS listings or in DNS resolution. If you don't have control of the DNS records, then there's nothing you can do but complain. Or change email providers.
 
It's weird then that it'd be so intermittent.

I'll look at the controls and see if there's anything to be done with my DNS settings.
 
Bump, with info.

After a response from the tech support people (in some version of English I'm not entirely familiar with), and some searching, it seems that this error might be due to AOL's spam controls.
I got a different error after my webhost "fixed" the problem:

Connected to 205.188.155.89 but connection died. (#4.4.2)


That's an AOL mailserver. It seems that others have had similar problems, and the best guess is that it's from their various spam filters. Lovely. I guess since my server isn't Yahoo, Hotmail, or.....some major ISP or something, it's got a high chance of being spam, as far as AOL is concerned. "So easy to use, now wonder- why the hell does anyone use them?!?"

The fun part is, I don't know right away if my message will be rejected. It takes exactly 30 minutes for the failure message to come back.
 
It's failrly easy to end up on AOL's blocklist as a potential spammer. You can apply to AOL to get your mailserver sorta' whitelisted, where they will allow a certain number of complaints before blocking your mailserver:

http://postmaster.aol.com

But the application is normally done by the owner of your mailserver. I've done it for some of my clients who send large volumes of email to AOL members, who sometimes accidentally label the email as SPAM.

 
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