Don't you mean buggy mail servers? That's what MX RRs are for, after all. - Panagiotis Astithas

As I said, sendmail established the tradition of contacting the AA RR when _no_ MX server is available (for whatever reason) and does so since the 80s - Yiorgos Adamopoulos

Is re-direct the only option? I mean, can't you set up both the with-and-without www domain to work the same way? 9me, an ignorant :P) - George Tziralis

No not an ignorant, just not a system administrator :) You can have setups that satisfy both needs, but IMHO they add needless complexity, e.g. having switches that route TCP traffic accordingly. If it were up to me I would prefer none (no contacting of the A RR and no http://do.main). Why are we even supposed to expect that http://do.main == http://www.do.main ? - Yiorgos Adamopoulos

Having no MX servers available is a sufficiently rare case, that I wouldn't trade a simple, memorable name for :-) - Panagiotis Astithas

Sufficiently rare? What has the software developer done to the system administrator within you? - Yiorgos Adamopoulos

I like being able to forward emails to user@hostname, or even user@IP, without having to set up a DNS server and the corresponding MX records. Exp. when it comes to intranet management and administration. - Panayotis Vryonis

It's the businessman in me, actually. You'd be surprised how little impact a few failed e-mail deliveries have in a small/medium size business. People always pick up the phone and complain (not that I've had MX failures often, mind you). Losing customers/users for lack of a memorable service name is OTOH a very tangible issue for us. Then again I don't work for an ISP, so our priorities are probably inverse! - Panagiotis Astithas

@adamo: the www part is a long established tradition (using your words :) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Dimitris Giannitsaros