I believe this is an enom domain related issue rather than a web hosting related issue which is why I am posting it here.

I'm having trouble doing what I want to do. I think it should be possible to do, I just can't figure out how to do it or there's a problem with the enom system.

I have 2 domains registered with enom, call them Domain1.com and Domain2.com. Domain1.com is hosted on a web hosting service, not enom's hosting. In enom for Domain1.com, I have dns pointed to my web host, call it ns1.host.com and ns2.host.com. Everything is fine with Domain1.com, it works fine, mail goes to it and I get it fine, etc.

I set up Domain2.com to be an alias of Domain1.com. In my web host, in the configuration for Domain1.com, I added Domain2.com as a domain alias. In enom, I have Domain2.com set to use enom's domain servers and I set up 2 CNAME records, one for www and one for @, both with an address of www.Domain1.com. Things work fine at this point, if I go to http://www.Domain2.com it gives me the Domain1.com site like I want.

But, I don't want any mail service for Domain2.com. I want mail to Domain2.com to bounce as an invalid address. I can't get that to happen. When I send mail to anybody@Domain2.com I get a message back from my Domain1.com site saying that there was a problem deliverying to anybody@www.Domain1.com. hop count exceeded. It looks like it is using the alias to send it to Domain1.com and looking at the headers, it has several entries from my host's mail server saying that the message was received from itself destined for anybody@www.Domain1.com. After going through that 25 times it throws up and sends the reject back to me as hop count exceeded. Initially, the domain config for Domain2.com in enom was set for no email services and if you looked further it said that there were no MX records. I think I read somewhere that if there are no MX records then it will try to send mail to the A record. So, I set up email forwarding on Domain2.com. Initially I did not specify any email addresses to forward to, especially not for *, but the same thing happened. I thought that maybe it needed something to get the table built, so I added junk@Domain2.com to forward to junk@Domain1.com, but still no difference. Even if I send to junk@Domain2.dom I get the message about hop count exceeded to junk@www.Domain1.com. If you look at the DNS config for Domain2.com it shows MX records for enom's forwarding, whichi s something like eforward1.name-services.com.

Just out of curiosity, I checked something else. I have Domain3.com also with enom, and I have had it set up for URL forwarding to Domain4.com/domain3/. I was not interested in email on this account and left it set at no email config. I sent a msg to anybody@Domain3.com and I expected an invalid address reject, but didn't get anything. I tried several emails to Domain3.com and I don't know where they're going, I'm certainly not getting them back. All this time I thought such emails would get bounced, but no.

So, is there a way that I can have it set up so that email to Domain2.com (and Domain3.com) will bounce as invalid? At least mail to Domain2.com is being returned as undeliverable, but only after it apparently goes back and forth to my web site several times, which is undesirable. Seems to me that I should be able to specify something pertaining to the MX records in the enom DNS to kill the mail, but how do I do it? Or is there a problem or quirk with the way enom works in this regard?


Thanks.

Never mind, I think I found that the problem is with my ISP who requires me to use their SMTP servers. I found something else quirky and I tried it from a couple of web mail accounts I have and it seems to be working as expected. Looks like my ISP may be ignoring the MX record info. I guess I need to contact them or find someone who knows more about DNS to help me out. I thought all of the domain related DNS info would be propogated everywhere, I don't know if that's not true or if, as I say, maybe my ISP isn't considering the MX record info. Anyway, sorry for the long post.