Anyone else having trouble sending mail the EarthLink domains?

It looks like Earthlink has made some changes to their DNS servers this week so that they no longer respond to queries for the ANY/wildcard RR type. Since qmail uses this type of query in the dns_cname function which is defined in dns.c, attempts to send mail to EarthLink domains (including earthlink.net, mindspring.com, etc) fail with an DNS soft error and the message stays in the queue. When qmail encounters a DNS soft error, the "cname_lookup_failed_temporarily" message appears in the log. The most common cause of this error is unpatched qmail receiving a response from the DNS server that contains more than 512 bytes of data. However it also gets logged any time there is a dns query soft error. To see that the problem is with the ANY query, try doing 

dig -t ANY earthlink.net

When I contacted EarthLink about the problem, the support agent tried to blow me off by telling me that they weren't aware of any problems with people not being able to send email to EarthLink domains and that it must be a problem with the mail server. I was able to get the agent to escalate the issue and am waiting for a call back. If any else is running into the problem, please contact EarthLink. Hopefully, if they get multiple complaints they will take the issue more seriously and get it resolved.

BTW, If you need a temporary work around until EarthLink fixes the problem, you can add a static smtp route to /var/qmail/control/smtproutes indicating the IP address where mail for the domain name should be sent. Since the EarthLink DNS servers still respond to MX and A queries, you can query them to get the IP address to use smtproutes.


J.T.