On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, Ingrid Shafer wrote:

> Once again I am receiving piles of these kinds of error messages for
> AOL subscribers:
> CNAME lookup failed temporarily. (#4.4.3)
> I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.
>
> My AOL subscribers have been receiving mail more regularly  for the
> past month or so, but still report that messages tend to arrive up
> to 5 days late, in random order, and -- at times -- not at all.

It appears that AOL recently expanded its DNS record size beyond the
standard 512 bytes. Apparantly, this is non-standard and creates problems
for a lot of Unix MTAs. I found a patch for the qmail software that we use
on the Listserv that hosts your lists, but it there is absolutely no
documentation with it as to how it should be installed. As soon as I
figure this out, the problem should be fixed.