A public castigation of my former domain registrar
If you are using GoDaddy.com as your domain registrar, I recommend you change. If you are also using them as your DNS host, I strongly recommend you change.
The problems that we had over the past few days with my .org domains (s-gabriel.org for the Academy of S. Gabriel, heraldsnet.org [the home of the online Parker], sharonchapel.org [my local parish], michaelines.org [the Order of St. Michael], sundaysuppers.org [the mobile soup kitchen at which I volunteer], and huiekin.org [the family website for the descendents of my Chinese great-grandfather]) were begun last week when I learned that GoDaddy had without my knowledge (let alone permission) added entries to the DNS for three of my domains (one of the .org domains, one of the .net domains, and the one .us domain) which were interfering with email. (I had an MX pointing to mail.domain for each domain, and an A record for mail.domain. They added a second MX at the same priority pointing to their mail server and a CNAME for mail.domain also pointing to their mail server. And their mail server was rejecting mail as invalid relay attempts because it hadn't been set up to accept mail for those domains.) So I deleted the extra DNS entries and started a bulk transfer of the domain names to my new registrar. (I had been in the process of switching already, but hadn't actually transferred any, only registered the new domains with the new registrar.)
Once I confirmed to GoDaddy that the domains were to be transferred, they killed my administrative access to them (meaning I couldn't change the listed authoritative name servers) and then deleted the zone files for them (meaning the authoritative name servers under their control claimed the domains didn't exist). However, the registration of the domains didn't change until 24 hours later, so I couldn't change the listed authoritative name servers through the new registrar either.
Fortunately (though I had been fuming about it over the weekend), it took longer for confirmation to be requested on the .net domains (scadian.net and michaelines.net), so I was able to update their authoritative name servers before GoDaddy nuked them, and we weren't *completely* dead in the water. It was pretty bad, though, since the rDNS of the server is in the heraldsnet.org domain, so some outgoing mail was rejected because the rDNS name didn't resolve.
The problems that we had over the past few days with my .org domains (s-gabriel.org for the Academy of S. Gabriel, heraldsnet.org [the home of the online Parker], sharonchapel.org [my local parish], michaelines.org [the Order of St. Michael], sundaysuppers.org [the mobile soup kitchen at which I volunteer], and huiekin.org [the family website for the descendents of my Chinese great-grandfather]) were begun last week when I learned that GoDaddy had without my knowledge (let alone permission) added entries to the DNS for three of my domains (one of the .org domains, one of the .net domains, and the one .us domain) which were interfering with email. (I had an MX pointing to mail.domain for each domain, and an A record for mail.domain. They added a second MX at the same priority pointing to their mail server and a CNAME for mail.domain also pointing to their mail server. And their mail server was rejecting mail as invalid relay attempts because it hadn't been set up to accept mail for those domains.) So I deleted the extra DNS entries and started a bulk transfer of the domain names to my new registrar. (I had been in the process of switching already, but hadn't actually transferred any, only registered the new domains with the new registrar.)
Once I confirmed to GoDaddy that the domains were to be transferred, they killed my administrative access to them (meaning I couldn't change the listed authoritative name servers) and then deleted the zone files for them (meaning the authoritative name servers under their control claimed the domains didn't exist). However, the registration of the domains didn't change until 24 hours later, so I couldn't change the listed authoritative name servers through the new registrar either.
Fortunately (though I had been fuming about it over the weekend), it took longer for confirmation to be requested on the .net domains (scadian.net and michaelines.net), so I was able to update their authoritative name servers before GoDaddy nuked them, and we weren't *completely* dead in the water. It was pretty bad, though, since the rDNS of the server is in the heraldsnet.org domain, so some outgoing mail was rejected because the rDNS name didn't resolve.