Home / server / Questions / 726598
Accepted
LPChip
Asked: 2015-10-05 04:45:28 +0800 CST

MX record point to itself, possible?

  • 772

Lets say I have the following DNS active for domain example.com (leaving out priority and ttl)

   example.com A    123.45.67.89
mx.example.com A    123.45.67.89
   example.com MX   mx.example.com

Now, this is a valid DNS record. If I were to add the following mx record, would that cause any problems?

mx.example.com MX   mx.example.com

I have tested this, and it seems to work, but I want to be sure.

The reason is, I always used [email protected] to email without this last mx record added. But some services fail because they're not using the main domain, but rather check for the subdomain if that mx record is present. Adding the mx record seems to allwo the services to work, but I now am worried it may cause problems for actually sending/receiving email.

Also, I have set the priority for the new mx record to be lower to the original one, so in theory that should make it always choose the first one, but I'm curious it would even work if the priorities were reversed.

domain-name-system

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    An MX RR pointing to itself is perfectly valid and will cause no problems. It may be considered redundant, though, because of the general rule that if a domain name has no MX RR but an A RR, the latter shall be used for mail delivery. In other words, an MX RR pointing to itself is implicitly assumed when no explicit MX RR is present.

    Note that your example code has syntactic problems. The FQDNs lack final dots, and the MX RRs lack priority fields. It should read:

       example.com.    A    123.45.67.89
   mx.example.com. A    123.45.67.89
   example.com.    MX   10 mx.example.com.
   mx.example.com. MX   10 mx.example.com.

    or, equivalently:

       $ORIGIN example.com.
   @               A    123.45.67.89
                   MX   10 mx
   mx              A    123.45.67.89
                   MX   10 mx

    (The $ORIGIN directive being redundant if the whole is part of the zone file for domain example.com.)

    • 16

  2. You seemed to confuse yourself. DNS MX-RR format domain MX pref name is used to say that server with a name name will be an MX for the domain domain.

    In your case you are saying that server with name mx.example.com will handle mail for mx.example.com domain. This is perfectltly valid, but it seems to me that you want to set up an MX for example.com.

    • 5

  3. I guess the core of your question has been answered, but you might want to clear up some confusion:

    1. There is no "second MX record with lower priority", MX record priorities are scoped to names, both names in your example have only one MX each, so the priority is completely without consequence. An MTA looks up the MX records for exactly the host part it's trying to deliver to, nothing else (except for the A/AAAA lookup if the MX lookup gives zero result records).
    2. Also, the MX record doesn't "point to itself" - it only happens to contain the same hostname that it's stored under, but that name points to A and AAAA records, which are distinct from the MX record stored under that same name. In DNS, you can store any number of different records under the same name, and there is nothing wrong with one record under one name pointing to another record under the same name - the only thing that's not a good idea is actually pointing to the same record, like having a CNAME record with its own name in it, as that in turn would point at the same CNAME record, etc., ad infinitum.
    • 5