'talking to myself' errors again

[Roy C Bixler <rcb@press-gopher.uchicago.edu>]

I just had a rather bad bout with this just now.  I even got automatically
removed from one high traffic mailing list because of too many bounced
messages. :-(

We have 2.99.36 Z-mailer running on a Solaris 2 system.  This 'talking to
myself' problem only happens when the system is re-started.  In the past,
if I take care to shut down Z-mailer gracefully, making sure all processes
are finished and doing a 'zmailer cleanup' before shutting down the whole
system, the problem usually would not occur.  I took the precautions this
time, stayed around for a while after system started up again to make sure
eveything's fine, but when I returned the next morning, I found I have a
mailbox full of bounced messages.  In one hour, between 9am and 10am, it
was particularly bad, but the bounces continued to trickle through
afterwards until I shut down Z-mailer once again and re-started it. 

Is this really a problem with our name service as suggested once before?
I use the /etc/hosts file first and DNS second.  My /etc/hosts file looks
like:

#
# Internet host table
#
127.0.0.1	localhost	
128.135.234.36	press-gopher.uchicago.edu PRESS-GOPHER.uchicago.edu press-gopher PRESS-GOPHER loghost mailhost

All the other stuff after the 'press-gopher.uchicago.edu' was inserted in
hopes of convincing Z-mailer that it is not 'talking to myself' ... :-|

Or is there another problem here?  I hope there can be some kind of
workaround for this, because while Z-mailer ordinarily works great, it
gets very annoying to wonder if it will behave itself after restarting the
system.

Roy Bixler
University of Chicago Press
rcb@press-gopher.uchicago.edu