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The Woo
Asked: 2010-08-03 03:04:17 +0800 CST

MX and A Records

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Just a quick question about A and MX records.

If I have a domain that I have purchased, and I want to get remote mail working eventually, to say: mail.exampledomain.com, do I just put in with my hosting provider an A record like: Record FQDN=mail.example.com Record Type=A Record Value=my ip address

Also, with MX records, at the moment I have an entry as such: Priority=10 Host=@ Goes To=mailstore1.secureserver.net

How do I set it up so that I can forward email to an exchange server that I'm trying to setup.

Thanks.

domain a-record

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Your assumptions about A-records are correct.

    MX records are quite easy to understand, it's the same as A-records expect that they have a cost field to either have backup MX'es (very common) or for load-balancing (common for heavy traffic).

    Example:

    smalldomain.com
A: mail1.domain.com
MX 10 mail1.domain.com
MX 20 backupmail.mailprovider.com

bigdomain.com
A: mail1.domain.com
A: mail2.domain.com
MX 10 mail1.domain.com
MX 10 mail2.domain.com
MX 20 backupmail.mailprovider.com

    (and so on. Lower cost = higher priority)

    In your example you wanna change your MX record to point to your own mail server, but I highly recommend that you get a backup MX somewhere - on a totally different internet provider than your own servers.

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