Le sigh. It appears #mozilla is too distracted with #AI and #LLMs to run their good old #email correctly. Maybe they should buy @mwl 's #RYOMS and learn a thing or two.

I signed up for their community forums so I could comment on the AI experiment in Nightly. This, as you can imagine, is getting A LOT of noise and I think mozilla is trying to email me and tell me that things have happened on that thread. I'm not getting the emails. My upstream mail receiver is showing 775 messages queued up for me, that my email server keeps rejecting. Let's look at why.

1. The host community.mozilla.ORG is a CNAME to bnzry48543.lithium.com.
2. bnzry48543.lithium.com. is a CNAME for d3rxjeenbqqyxw.cloudfront.net., which is AWS's CloudFront CDN service.
3. There are no MX records for community.mozilla.ORG because there cannot be any others. If you're a CNAME, you can't have any other records. God only knows why there is this extra lithium.com CNAME in there. Probably so they can have an Alias record in a hosted AWS zone. (Hint: this is the dumb way to do it. The right way is to create community.mozilla.org as a Route53 zone, so you can get the Alias records for CloudFront, then in your mozilla.org zone you create NS records for the Route53 zone. Look at how I do blog.paco.to at AWS, when paco.to DNS is not hosted at AWS for an example).
4. The Mozilla community software is sending emails out with a from address of community@connect.mozilla.COM.
5. If you run dig connect.mozilla.com any you will find (assuming you find the same as me), a single, solitary TXT record: "v=spf1 include:%{i}._ip.%{h}._ehlo.%{d}._spf.vali.email ~all". I'm not up enough on fancy-ass SPF records, but what I can tell you is that there is NO MX record for connect.mozilla.com. That makes it a pretty illegitimate domain to be on the righthand side of an @ in email. If I would like to send email to community@connect.mozilla.com, where should I direct that mail? Undefined. Ergo, illegitimate.

So, at the moment, my SMTP upstream and I are stuck in a bit of an argument. They've accepted the email from connect.mozilla.com and when they present it to my mail server, I say 'illegal domain, man. fuck off.' Well, they're a little stuck. They can't send that rejection back to the originator, because that's not possible (No MX record). So they pause, consider their life choices, and try again. I'm currently fielding 1800 attempts per hour and I have no idea how many of those are the umpteenth retry of something sent 5 days ago, and how many are a first email that was sent this morning. (It's no big deal. I mentioned it to my support folks, they'll get it fixed soon)

Maybe someone at Mozilla can ask #ChatGPT "How do I configure DNS records for email?" and get a halfway competent reply. I wish they'd just work on #firefox features that I want, instead.

#dns #smtp #itsalwaysdns