Communicator and the 40sec send delay

Re: Communicator and the 40sec send delay

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Heath,

Since nobody else answered, I'll take a stab at it. I was hesitant
because, though I know DNS, I'm not intimately familiar with either
SIMS or the mail settings of Netscape.

At 1:48 PM +0100 6/9/00, Heath wrote:
>After discovering the fix, I'm hoping that somebody here can explain
>why this is happening.
>
>Running SIMS 1.8b7 mailserver software (outside my Firewall), CISCO
>Firewall, client machine running Netscape Communicator (v4.7 or
>various) behind the firewall, at this point let me leave out
>QuickDNS and simply use the ISP's DNS (also outside the firewall).
>
>The problem is a simple one, in the preferences for Net Comm 4.7, if
>the email address is set to <user>@deepend.co.uk then it used to
>take 43 seconds to send an email. If you set the email address to
><user>@mailhost.deepend.co.uk and the Reply-to-address to
><user>@deepend.co.uk it would send instantly.

So your identity setting for your email address affected the sending
of mail. Very interesting.

Does SIMS try to look up your email address to ascertain whether
you're a legitimate user, and thus permitted to send outgoing email?

>It happens ONLY with Netscape on the Mac or PC...

Even more interesting. Question for the class: What is different
about the SMTP commands sent by Netscape vs. other mail clients when
sending mail? (Question assumes that the problem is in the
communication between Netscape and SIMS, rather than before Netscape
contacts SIMS.)

In the Netscape preferences panel named "Mail Servers", what do you
have entered as your SMTP server? It should be a name that has an A
or CNAME record that resolves to your mail server.

>In the last 48 hours I discovered that if I got my ISP to add an A
>record for deepend.co.uk, to equal the resolved address
>195.92.122.194 (my mailhost) then the problem goes away......I've
>also done it with one other domain I manage mail for, so this
>additional A record solves the problem.

OK, this definitely sounds like Netscape is having trouble resolving
the name of your server from the name in its settings.

>What I want to know is why am I having to add this A record to every
>domain I manage mail for?

Because something somewhere in this process wants to have an address
for your domain. Without the record, the attempt fails, which takes
some time.

>and by running Quick DNS locally (behind my firewall) how do I add
>these A records that my ISP has been adding (cause it obviously
>solves the problem).

Simplest solution:

1. Ask your ISP to permit your server to get zone transfers of your
domains from one of their servers.

2. In QuickDNS Pro Admin, take the following steps:

a. From the Window menu, choose Secondary Data.
b. From the Domain menu, choose Create Record.
c. In the resulting record, enter the following data:
Domain Name: deepend.co.uk.
Filename: deepend.co.uk.
IP Address 1: <IP address of ISP's server>
d. Repeat steps b and c for your other domains.
e. Click the Save button to close the dialog.

3. Launch QuickDNS Pro Server. Wait till it finishes writing lines to the log.

4. Quit the server.

5. In the QuickDNS Pro folder, there's a folder named QuickDNS Data.
Inside that folder is a folder called Secondary Data. At this point,
inside that folder there should be files for each of your domains. Move
these files to the Primary Data folder, which is also in the QuickDNS
Data folder.

6. In QuickDNS Pro Admin, reopen the Secondary Data window. Remove all entries.

7. Launch the server again.

At this point, your server has versions of your domains that are
identical to what your ISP has. This may not be what you want.

For example, with one of your domains open in QuickDNS Pro Admin,
from the Domain dialog, select Domain Information. You may want to
change the second and third fields in this dialog (the Primary and
Hostmaster fields) to reflect your server and your email address,
respectively.

You also may want to change at least one of the NS records in the
domain to point to your server instead of your ISP's server.
Furthermore, assuming you give your DNS server a name such as
ns1.deepend.co.uk, you'll want to create the appropriate A record in
the deepend.co.uk domain file for that name:

ns1.deepend.co.uk. A 195.92.122.195

(Change the IP address to the correct one - I just guessed.)
____________________________________________________________________
Chris Buxton cbuxton@menandmice.com
Men & Mice http://www.menandmice.com
Makers of: QuickDNS Pro

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