gmail started reporting SERVFAIL when sending email to my domain

[Toby Chappell]

I"m not sure exactly when the issue began, but now whenever a gmail user attempts to email an address at xeper.org (a domain I'm one of the admins for), they consistently receive a notice that SERVFAIL was encountered when looking up the MX records for xeper.org. It looked at first like the issue might have been happening only for Europe-based gmail users, but now I'm also encountering it in the US with my gmail account (and have other US-based gmail users reporting issues).

Yet, 'dig @8.8.8.8 xeper.org mx' and  'dig @8.8.4.4 xeper.org mx' always seem to resolve it just fine, so at least some Google DNS servers can find the records.

I've used several DNS diagnosis tool sites (mxtoolbox, whatsmydns, dns.google, intodns) to query the records and/or inspect the DNS config, but nothing jumps out.  As far as I am aware, *only* gmail users are having this issue sending email to addresses @xeper.org

What am I missing or could be potential causes for this?

We have a second domain, templeofset.org, which uses the same DNS servers yet gmail users have no problems sending email to addresses hosted on that domain. My first thought was it might be occasional issues timing out on DNS resolution, but the lack of problems with @templeofset.org addresses (not to mention the consistent occurrence of the failures) seems to rule that out.

Thanks for any insight or assistance,

Toby Chappell

[Toby Chappell]

We have since solved this by moving our name servers to Google Cloud DNS. 'dig +trace' was making it clear that our self-hosted name servers were taking too long to respond for Gmail's taste (implying that maybe google uses shorter timeouts than the rest of the internet for this... only gmail senders were receiving SERVFAIL when attempting to email addresses at our domain).

-Toby

[niraj karn]

If you don't mind, can you please reply if this is resolved for you?

[Payel Chowdery]

Thanks

[niraj karn]

Thank you Toby!

On Wednesday, July 6, 2022 at 9:42:51 AM UTC-5 Toby Chappell wrote: