Mail server woes

About two weeks ago we moved this home page from an old webserver to "helen", a relatively new server. Email is still hosted by Google but for a small window, the world thought mail should go to the web server instead of Google. We fixed that about 30 minutes after the move but some recurring problems persisted.

This is confusing, so bear with me. Helen hosts many domains - about 150. These are "virtual" domains meaning they share the same server and IP address. All but 5 of these accept mail from the outside. Those 5 domains are hosted at Google. Of the 145 remaining domains, most forward to accounts at ls.net which means that mail is "relayed" to Google. They can terminate locally but many web customers also had ls.net accounts and it was easier to catch them all at one place. Also helen does not filter mail so the amount of spam arriving at helen is large and passing it through Google takes advantage of Google's spam and virus filtering.

The problem was (is) that the mail server on helen thought it was the virtual mail server for ls.net even though DNS and the rest of the world knew it was at Google. Helen's mail server would grab that mail instead of forwarding it and then report that the "user" didn't exist and reply to the sender with a "bounced" message.

We fixed this once but the virtual hosting system reclaimed all the virtual domains including the five it should not have. Fixed for now but we are going to have to convince the virtual hosting system not to do that on its own.