Why does my Exchange Server Drop 1% of my mail?

The guy at microsoft said it was something about my cname or mx records or something?

@cfauver:

The guy at microsoft said it was something about my cname or mx records or something?

Firstly Exchange sucks.

Secondly Godaddy suck.

Thirdly either you misreported what the guy from MS said or he was a fricking moron.

Can you show us your DNS setup? It sounds like you might have a CNAME for a mail exchanger, which is forbidden.

Loads of us run mail and web on the same domain. It's a totally normal setup.

Exchange itself is fine IMO, but Office 365/Exchange Online is a disaster. At this point based on my experience with EO if I had a client asking me for support with it I would simply tell them I cannot provide them with support other than to migrate them elsewhere. It's that bad. While I do suspect you have a DNS issue I wouldn't discount EO/O365 as part of your issue. They botched that up so badly, it makes me cringe at all the hours I lost and frustration dealing with their outages and crap.

@haus:

Exchange itself is fine IMO, but Office 365/Exchange Online is a disaster. At this point based on my experience with EO if I had a client asking me for support with it I would simply tell them I cannot provide them with support other than to migrate them elsewhere. It's that bad. While I do suspect you have a DNS issue I wouldn't discount EO/O365 as part of your issue. They botched that up so badly, it makes me cringe at all the hours I lost and frustration dealing with their outages and crap.

Exchange isn't 'fine'. What you mean is that by comparison to the train wreck that is Exchange Online it doesn't seem so bad.

Exchange still needs a spiraling estate of domain controllers and backup domain controllers. It still needs an overpowered server for simple workloads. It's still nowhere near as expendable or flexible as a decent mail stack that will easily run on a single Linode 512.

There are goods reasons why professional exchange consultants still put postfix gateways before their exchange servers. Security is the most obvious.

Also you get bull from Microsoft who tell you crazy things like you can't run web and mail on the same domain even though doing exactly that is a RFC requirement.

That "bull" is some massively broken mailers sometimes sending email to server mentioned in the A record instead of the MX record.

Weird it sums up to as much as 1%, though. Maybe it's one that tries to fall back to A when all MXes are down and outlook.com is down so often.

Said that, people - business email and "IT" email are different cases. In nearly all businesses, they want to use outlook as client, and use the calendaring feature. So, it's either Exchange on-premises with all the costs and security concerns, or outsourced Exchange.

And well, when I got a "third and final warning" for not top-posting… as I said, different worlds, different cases.

@rsk:

That "bull" is some massively broken mailers sometimes sending email to server mentioned in the A record instead of the MX record.

Which is absolutely correct behavior if there are no MX records.

Maybe GoDaddy DNS is not reporting MX records some of the time. They have been known to have DNS issues every once in a while.

My biggest beef with O365 is that they hijacked the DNS/MX records for use in their methods to authenticate ownership of a domain. that whole "XXXXX.msv1.invalid." MX entry junk…