Hi Scott, and good to see you. Thanks for the reply. Your last paragraph really answers my original question as to why DNS Report was unhappy with our original setup. I hadn't realized that it would require a zone transfer to get a list of our MX records, but now that you've made that point, it all becomes clear.
Now you also mentioned subdomains, and that has me confused. I wasn't trying to create a subdomain. or to have no MX record. We just had a single domain, with an MX record, but the MX record had a name (instead of being an @ record). You referred to "subdomain/hostname mail.example.com", but aren't those very different things? A host would be a record with a name (such as mail), while a subdomain would be another zone within the parent zone that has it's own list of record (e.g., you could have a web site www.mail.example.com). Thanks again. Ben ----- Original Message ----- From: "R. Scott Perry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, July 01, 2005 5:17 PM Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] OT: mx record is there, yet isn't > > However, the thing that keeps bothering me now is why DNS Report only > > expects a root MX record, and not a named MX record. If this is just a > > matter of convention, as I always believed, then they should be able to > > handle it both ways. If, however, I'm just ignorant and the root > record is > > somehow special, then I need to be more aware of this to avoid future > > problems. So how much of this is Standards, and how much is just > > convention? > > It is 100% convention. It is perfectly acceptable to have a domain > example.com that has no MX record, and have a subdomain/hostname > mail.example.com that has an MX record. Because of convention, very few > domains do not accept E-mail to the main domain name. But there is > nothing that requires them to do so besides convention. > > As for the DNS Report, it checks for the MX record because of convention > (since about 99% of domains want to accept E-mail to their domain > name). As for why it doesn't check your way, that's because it is > nearly impossible to do so. Specifically, the only way to find a list > of hostnames on your domain is to do a zone transfer on your domain -- > and most people have now turned off zone transfers. So we can't just > look at a list of your DNS records and pick out the MX records. > -Scott > > To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html > List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ > Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/ > To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
