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Matthew
Asked: 2010-09-15 20:17:17 +0800 CST

Understanding generally how emails are received / sent (dns records)

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So I registered a domain name through google, and I'm going to set up a small server through rackspace's cloud servers.

I'd prefer to keep my email going to google apps, rather than have to have my cloud server handle the mail.

There's a line in my domain services section that has this:

host: mail address: ghs.google.com. record type: cname

Do I just leave that line in?

So does email just get sent to mail.example.com? I mean generally speaking if I sent an email to [email protected], does it really just send it to [email protected]? Or am I confused or something.

Also, how could this potentially affect sending mail from the cloud server?

email cloud-computing g-suite rackspace rackspace-cloud

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You should let Google handle the mail reception / sending if your cloud should not take care of it.

    The MX DNS type is specific to mail and conveniently indicates (with priorities) which server will actually handle mail reception for a given domain. Thus avoiding the need to specify a mail server / subdomain. But it may work also without the mail. prefix, if the mail.smith.com host has a valid IP address and accepts mail for that domain.

    But usually MX entries are created in DNS to specify that mail.smith.com will handle the mail for the smith.com domain. It makes things easier.

    See Wikipedia

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