jamescuarterodotcom

i recently set up a domain name for a client with a new host and was not informed that they wanted to keep their email with their original host. i just needed to add an MX record for email and it should be switched back. new host is on a shared server so no IP address for A record and adding general name servers overrides any MX records i add. so instead of using name servers i added a forward to the domain, pointed it to the new host, the A records point to my forwarding IP and the MX record is added.

however, test emails i’m sending out are coming back with the following message:

host lookup did not complete: retry timeout exceeded

there’s additional weirdness: after a few hours the forward was visible to myself and users in other locations except for the main office. looks like it could be a cached page on their proxy but i have no way of clearing that up for them (the machine doesn’t appear to be local).

ugh, i should have done this last friday.

update: looks like the MX change is taking a little longer than the “two hours” network solutions indicated but email is slowly coming back. ISP said that the PCs in the office may be holding onto cached DNS information. Reboot didn’t work, going to try ipconfig /flushdns next.

update 2: it turns out there was a DCHP server in the building of which i (and most of the staff) was unaware. sure enough there was unreleased lookup information in the DNS cache. cleared the cache and then did ipconfig /flushdns on all machines, everything seems to be fine now.