I have two raq 3 servers with the same dedicated company. Right now a wierd thing is happening with most of the domains I have tested on both servers: I can send and recieve email fine on the servers to third party email accounts (such as yahoo or hotmail), however, if you try to send from one email account on the 1st raq 3 to a 2nd email account on the 2nd Raq 3 server- it takes a minute to actually send (lag) and then it doesn't actually get recieved on the other server. Does anyone have any idea as to why this would be? Would a dedicated/co location host block emails between two servers?

I am really not sure what to do to fix this, and would appreciate some help.

Thanks,
DK

This sound's like it might be a network setup issue that is actually implemented quite often. If you are in the same datacenter, you probably have the same IP sheme and subnet mask. Most Dedicated Hosts/ISP's setup their routers to not route a packet who is on the same network (IP Scheme) out of the interfaces. This is done to prevent information that doesn't need to leave the network leave. However, because of the RaQ's DNS setup, you are actually performing a mail loop. This is what's happening:

Packet "A" wants to leave from somedomain.com to somedomain2.com. Both are on the same network.

Packet "A" reaches the router. The router asks, "Where are you going". Packet "A" says, somedomain2.com (it would actually use the IP).

The router says, "Packet A, you are trying to access something that is on my network, go back and find it."

It will most likely not. This is because the RaQ's DNS system is not authoriative. Thus, the RaQ refers to DNS from the next available DNS system, which is usually off the network. Since the packet can never get there, it's probably discarded.