On Saturday I had a call from someone because the email they sent me had bounced back to them as undeliverable. I immediately thought this must be a problem with this persons email skills, wrong name, domain etc. but I thought I’d check. I opened Outlook and saw the last email to me at this domain had arrived Thursday morning, and suspiciously, there was no junk mail since then … so alarms bells started ringing in the distance, but I wasn’t to worried as this was surely simple and quick to check and fix…how wrong I was!
My first inclination was to check the DNS settings at my ISP, especially the MX records. These were all fine and my MX was pointing as expected to Hotmail, as I use the Live Custom Domains option. So, nothing wrong there. Next stop the Live Admin for custom domains. Bingo! warning messages all over this console;
But Hang on! it says my DNS is not configured ‘Pending DNS Configuration’ and a careful check between this and my ISP DNS settings shows no differences … what gives? So after a struggle I find an email address to which Live support queries can be sent and ask them what the pending change is as there is no direct reference as to exactly what setting is wrong. After 30 mins I hadn’t got a reply (even automated) and I realised that I had used the failing email address so I resubmitted a new ticket. Shockingly, the new ticket was over 9000 higher than my last one half an hour previously! I guess a lot of people worldwide have issues with Live. Apart from the automated reply I have not received a reponse. So no immediate help there…
So, I needed to be more proactive and sent a few test emails which all disappeared without being received. So I decided to get low level and see if I could track what was actually happening so my first step was to see where the email sever was being told to send email in case my ISP DNS had failed.
I used the trusty NSLookup utility to see what was going on with DNS.
NSLookup -sil -qMX timcarmichael.com
Server: 209.68.2.46
Address: 209.68.2.46#53
Non-authoritative answer:
timcarmichael.com canonical name = blog.timcarmichael.com.
blog.timcarmichael.com canonical name = timcarmichael.wordpress.com.
timcarmichael.wordpress.com canonical name = lb.wordpress.com.
Authoritative answers can be found from:
wordpress.com
origin = ns1.wordpress.com
mail addr = mmmmmm.gmail.com
serial = 2005071858
refresh = 14400
retry = 7200
expire = 604800
minimum = 60
EEEK! wordpress.com have become my home nameserver! they obviously have no knowledge of my real settings and list the MX as GMail. No wonder I stopped receiving email. But there is no way to contact their support as they are on holiday… so I contact my ISP to see whats happening and how on earth my real settings got orphaned and wordpress took over. I didn’t even know that wordpress had nameservers.
Now I knew what the problem was I could fix it. I unlocked my domain at my ISP and reset the nameservers back to my ISP. Nothing more I could do now as DNS updates can take up to 48 hours to propagate.
That still leaves me with the question, still unanswered, how did wordpress.com become my nameserver? my domain was definitely locked at my ISP which means no-one but me should be able to make changes. So how did they?
I’ll update when I know … but I’m not holding my breath as to when I get a response. What this proves though is that when faced with a problem like this you are really on your own to resolve it, if you can, no matter how urgent and important it is.
The worst thing was I lost all my existing email in the hotmail account! Fortunately I have a backup, but this would definitely catch the unwary. When live domains eventually re-found the DNS was correct again it seemed to associate me to a brand new (and empty) hotmail account. So beware!
What a nightmare, and no-one to help! These free services are only good if you can sort any problems out yourself, assuming you can discover and understand the problem. So I hope this helps someone else, or me again in the future.
