It might be the case that it's useful for an MTA to have an option to
skip MX lookup for specific destinations because of DNS brokenness at
those destinations. But this seems to me to be outside of the scope of
the standard. Skipping MX lookup is not acceptable as a general
practice, nor is it something we want to encourage.
In general, it's always been acceptable to configure an MTA to handle
mail in some special-case way for specific domains where there was
specific knowledge such that the special-case handling made sense for
those domains. The MX-then-A lookup is what you should do in the
absence of any such knowledge.
Ned Freed wrote:
--On Tuesday, 25 March, 2008 23:18 -0400 Keith Moore
<moore(_at_)network-heretics(_dot_)com> wrote:
You know, that's a very interesting point. One of more common
configuration variations we see is to disable MX lookups and
just use address records.
how does anyone expect that to work across administrative
domains?
Sorry, I'm now completely confused. Maybe it has just been a
long day, but...
Ned, by "disable MX lookups", do you mean "don't put MX records
into the DNS zone and therefore force a fallback to the address
records" or "ignore the requirement of the standard that
requires using MX records if they are there"?
I'm talking about having the ability to disable DNS MX lookups entirely
and fall back to address information.
If the latter,
the behavior, however useful (or not) is, IMO, so far outside
the standard that it is irrelevant to any discussion about how
DNS records are used in a standard way.
I'm sorry, but i don't see it that way. I was close to convinced that this
sort
of fallback behavior was no longer useful under any circumstances until Bill
reminded me that's not the case.
Ned
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