DNS issues with domains are, frankly, some of the nastiest, ugliest Web-based problems you can have. The reason why is that they involve computers that you can’t control directly (such as the 13 demi-god root servers). I won’t go into the ugly details about what happened with a family member’s personal domain today, but suffice it to say that it was one of this DNS situations where a DNS server wasn’t giving out the right information, and that had the chain reaction of breaking all sorts of things, including email. I spent 45+ minutes trying to convince their tech support people that something was wrong with one or more of their DNS machines (they couldn’t see it because they were connected to a different DNS), but I finally decided to try a long-shot and I added a new record (a CNAME) and voila, within an hour everything was working again. So, when faced with bizarre non-updating DNS records, create a new entry to force the update process to kick off again.