Sendmail problem?

[Contract Support]

I'm having a very weird problem: sendmail will try to send ~1 out of 20 emails to the domainname of the address instead of the MX host (foo.com in mark@foo.com instead of mail.foo.com) and I get multiple rejects. I've checked DNS and sendmail but have found no cause for this to be failing occassionally. I've also tracked down each of the domains to be hosted by the same large hosting company (XO).

Any pointers?

HP/UX 11.00
Sendmail 8.11.1
BIND 8.1.2

Thanks,
Tk

[Shannon Petry]

If there are no problems with any other server/domain, then I'd chalk it up to their bad DNS. (probably Windows name service of some kind giving bad MX hosts periodically. I have had trouble with some IE hosts running off of a popular and recent Window$ name service that could not send us mail 90% of the time. after 20 reboots and them rebuilding their name service it works, but now they have problems with 2 other companies).

TO be on the safe side, watch your server logs really close. If it's only their server then maybe write a script that looks up their MX record every couple minutes for a few days, and see if my guess is correct.

Regards,
Shannon