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I have just taken ownership of a domain which had a couple of associated email addresses. I have left the mail boxes with the previous host, and so have been looking at updating the MX records in my domain registrar to forward the incoming/outgoing mail.

I have seen that some people setup an A record for mail. which points to the IP of the mail server. However, the instructions I followed only mentioned adding the 3 MX records with different priorities.

Without the mail subdomain set up, what do I use as the server name when connecting via iPhone and Outlook? As this was previously mail.domain.com

Thanks,

C Shelton
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2 Answers2

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The convention to use mail.domain.com is becoming a standard because of some non technical's points too;

  • Often mail server can be setup for OWA or remote mail navigation in a browser. As such it's easy to tell a user to navigate to mail.domain.com for that purpose.

  • If you use multiple web service and have a router that allow it, using a dedicated name for the OWA will allow you at the router level to process inbound NAT rule for the web service that will redirect to the correct web server depending on the domain name the user is requesting.

You could use any entry in your MX record, but using mail.domain.com is convenient to say atleast for a end user view.

yagmoth555
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When you connect with iPhone or Outlook, the MX records don't matter. You can use any name for the mail host(s) (incoming and outgoing), or you can omit names and enter IP addresses directly (not recommended).

The MX records are needed for the server to receive emails from the outside. The MX records must point to valid A records.

If your instructions mention adding 3 specific MX records, then the A records for these three names already exist and your provider has already configured these mail servers to accept emails for your domain. Your provider should also have given you the names to use for incoming and outgoing servers (POP/IMAP and SMTP).

If you have your own mail server, you must create an A record that points to the mail server and a MX record that points to the A record, and you have to configure the mail server. But then you wouldn't have instructions mentioning 3 MX records.

RalfFriedl
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