One of our newest members sent me an email and I replied to it. The next thing I know is this " DNS for host home.com is mis-configured" BS.
Hey, all I did was hit the reply button. This isn’t the first time this has happened.
I’m using Communicator 4.61
Somebody want to take a stab at it?
Thanks
Wow, I’m kinda surpised no one has responded to your question.
That is indeed a strange sort of mail error message. But, having just recreated it, I suspect I can be of some help.
The DNS reference is to Domain Name Service which translates domain names to IP addresses. In the Internet mail case, the protocol used is SMTP. When you send mail, your SMTP server (normally, it is your mail provider, but sometimes your network provider), needs to identify the server where the recipients email box is located. It will take the “@home” portion of the email address and query a DNS server to determine the IP address of the @home mailserver. The DNS server must have “MX” and “A” records for your SMTP server to complete its query successfully. In this case, the DNS server was unable to return the appropriate IP address to the SMTP server for the mail in question.
As you are probably aware, @home had been purchased by Excite, and excite@home just went bankrupt.
My guess is that the users email service has been transitioned to another domain (a new email address), but the user has not properly updated their mail settings. It is possible that in between the time they sent you a mail and when you responded the server was shut down.
It is probably more likely that the user changed their server settings, but failed to update their “reply to” setting, which is what appears when you try to reply to an email they sent.
One thing you could try is to look at the email headers on the mail you received, and try to determine if it was sent from the same account as the “reply-to” field indicated.
In MS Outlook, open the message, then from the menu, click on View and then Options, and then review the information in the Internet Headers box.
In MS Outlook Express, open the message, then from the menu, click File and then Properties, and select the Details tag.
I’m not familiar with the Communicator email client, so you may just poke around the menus and try to find a reference to “Internet Headers” or something similar.
The only other option I see would be to try and determine what new domain the user may now have. This would/could be difficult process, based on figuring out where the user is located and what network service provider they use (since most of the network providers that were using @home have replaced the services with their own).
Good Luck.