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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.

The Woo
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1 Answers1

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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.

pauska
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  • Just for completion: the *lower* the mx priority number the *more* preference. – Oscar Aug 02 '10 at 12:16
  • That's why it's actually the *costs* of using the respective MX host rather than its priority. I don't know who came up with the "priority" term. – joschi Aug 02 '10 at 12:51
  • I think the term "priority" is a windows thing. The RFC states about "preference number", which is equally weird ;-) – Oscar Aug 02 '10 at 13:06
  • Ah, forgot it was named cost. Thanks for the comments, I've updated my answer. – pauska Aug 02 '10 at 14:00