This is an complicated problem please bear with me. We send emails to our clients. Some of our clients have domains such as: opyonline.com juo.com These are serviced by ns1.fabulous.com. If you nslookup and set the server to ns1.fabulous.com you will see that the MX record for those domains are localhost.fabulous.com. Fine and dandy, using the same nslookup contacting ns1.fabulous.com you will see that localhost.fabulous.com resolves to a legitmate ip address (several to be exact). Now go back to the command line for either Windows or Linux and type ping localhost.fabulous.com it will start to ping 127.0.0.1 I thought this might just be one of my machines but all of my machines do this and we have a range of Windows OS's including Win2K, WinXP Pro, Win2K+3 Server. I also have RedHat 9, Debian Woody, and Fedora Core 2. All on the command line and using normal nslookup without setting the server to ns1.fabulous.com will resolve localhost.fabulous.com to be 127.0.0.1 This is causing us major pain and agony. The mails end up failing because of a mail loop and we cannot send mail to them. How can I deal with this? Do you see this problem? If you are having this problem is Fabulous.com brain-dead? Thank You Julian

All localhost resolves to 127.0.0.1. It is the loopback address of your computer. Outgoing address to your mail server would probably be smtp.fabulous.com or mail.fabulous.com or whatever your mail handler is.

Thank you for your reply. I wish it were that simple, I do not own nor control the domain fabulous.com, the domains we are trying to email to opyonline.com and juo.com have their dns controlled by fabulous.com. Fabulous.com has set their MX records to localhost.fabulous.com. Now if you type ping localhost.fabulous.com it always resolves to 127.0.0.1 which as you say is the loopback. Fabulous.com must either be Brain-dead or all the computers in the US cannot properly resolve localhost.fabulous.com, up to this time I have yet to find one that can. Thanx Julian

Try looking in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\HOSTS file (no extension and use WINNT instead of Windows for Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4). It's just a text file so you can open it with Notepad or your fav text editor. Remove the entry for localhost in there. It should then work. You may have to reboot after doing this to clear the name translation caches. Hope this helps. Also, i do think that's stupid to name your mail servers 'localhost' -Matt