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Xeoncross
Asked: 2011-01-09 12:19:24 +0800 CST

Why should www.domain and mail.domain be used?

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I see the default hostname for mail and web servers being set as mail.domain.tld and www.domain.tld respectively. Why is this? Does it help as you move from a single server to multiple servers?

I have always used plain domain.tld for both the mail and web server on a VPS (with a redirect rule for anyone that tries "www.").

domain-name best-practices hostname

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It's not only convention. Many email clients (i.e. thunderbird) will try to autodiscover the correct and best IMAP/POP3/SMTP settings based on the TLD with minimal input ([email protected] and password). In my experience, they try mail.domain.tld, imap.domain.tld first until they get a response from a IMAP/POP3 server. Same as SMTP.

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  2. Multiple server spanning is one component of the www convention. Another common reason is just that, convention. Some people are just accustomed to typing www before a url now and so, failing to add that subdomain can result in lost traffic. Better to implement it than risk losing some traffic.

    And while you may be using a redirect on the www, it still doesn't hurt to have it anyways.

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