Topic: Dial out email pickup

[Brian Read]

Hi

We are getting "Cannot get Canonical DNS name of xxxx.xxx.co.uk

where the xxxx.xxx is the ISP mail server.

Any ideas what mifght be causing this?

Cheers

Brian

[Ed Form]

Brian Read wrote:

> We are getting "Cannot get Canonical DNS name of
> xxxx.xxx.co.uk
>
> where the xxxx.xxx is the ISP mail server.
>
> Any ideas what mifght be causing this?

The most likely cause is that your ISP's DNS server doesn't get called early enough in the mail shout and the name xxxx.xxxx.co.uk cannot be resolved. You can solve the problem by finding the IP address of your ISP's pop3 server and putting that in the email retrieval settings instead of the name.

Ed Form

[Brian Read]

Actually that's  what I recommended (haven't heard whether it worked yet though).  Why does this happen?

[Dean Mumby]

Have a look at this thread , you may want to disable fetchmails use of dns querires as well if you are getting slow responses / timeouts

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=13200.msg49930#msg49930

Hope it helps

Dean

[Ed Form]

Brian Read wrote:
>
> Actually that's  what I recommended (haven't heard whether it
> worked yet though).  Why does this happen?

I think I asked about this a while back and didn't get a reply. The cause is a delay in DNS becoming available when the ISP's DNS servers are the only source. You can prove it if you arrange for the system to be online at mail time so that the DNS server has been located and accessed. The mail server name gets resolved properly and mail comes in perfectly. But, if you allow the mail shout to trigger a dialup the DNS does not become available quickly enough and the mail system gives up in disgust without getting your mail.

The e-smith handling of dialup connections is not very good. It is *very* prone to triggering retries and running up big bills for those who do not have an unlimited access account. I don't think anyone thought about the way in which the configuration works for dial-up pay accounts - but, the explicit use of the IP address of the mail server cures the problem, so it's useable at least.

Ed Form