ether/pad — Issue #303: Contact info at http://etherpad.org/contact/ broken
Author: AlainKnaff
Created: 2011-11-12 19:08:21+00:00
State: open

Yesterday I had tried to email the etherpad team about a more general issue, and attempted to use the contact address at http://etherpad.org/contact/ ("Email" link near top right of the page)

contact@etherpad.org

However, after sending a mail to this address, it bounced.
Apparently, the MX records configured in DNS are faulty:

> host -t mx etherpad.org
etherpad.org mail is handled by 10 secure.primaryt.co.uk.etherpad.org.
etherpad.org mail is handled by 20 duck.mclear.co.uk.etherpad.org.

Etherpad.org is (errnoneously?) appended to both records, this can happen when forgetting to include a trailing dot for the MX record in the DNS zone file. If this dot is not there, DNS software automatically appends current domain (etherpad.org) even though secure.primaryt.co.uk and duck.mclear.co.uk are already complete host names.

So I tried to get around this by setting up a manual route to the target mail server in my /etc/mail/mailertable .

However, even that did not work.
On primaryt.co.uk, I got "The email address that you entered couldn't be found", and on duck.mclear.co.uk I got ": Relay access denied"

===> so none of the 2 MX'es configured seem to know about contact@etherpad.org , even without the typo in the DNS zone file.

Moreover, the etherpad.org zone file has a SOA from January 18th this year... and apparently since then nobody seems to have noticed that mails intended for contact don't come in.

===> so wouldn't it be useful to replace the mail address on http://etherpad.org/contact/ with one that works (... and is read), or remove that page altogether