At 10:54 7/24/2003, vin wrote: >I had never bothered putting an mx record for my server, because I seemed to >be getting mail fine without it and I seem to remember from a while back, >some discussion that under some circumstances, mx records are not needed. >then the people at my dad's hospital changed their routers firmware or >something and he could no longer email me, because his servers need an mx >record. I put one, and now I get 1000% more spam. Is this a coincidence? >under what circumstances should I NOT need an mx record? the IT people know >it is a configuration error on their part, but I do not really understand >how mail gets delivered with no mx record, or if this is a good thing
An MX record is always required (per relevant RFCs) for a mail server that will be receiving mail from the Internet. An MX record is not (absolutely) required for a mail server that *only* sends mail. The reason you never got spam before is because your mail server was not an Internet mail server until you put up the MX record. When someone sends mail to you, their mail server does an MX lookup on the domain that the mail is addressed to. If it cannot find it, it fails and returns the mail to the sender as undeliverable (or, at least, that's the way it's supposed to work - obviously there can be mailers that are configured internally to handle mail to specific domains directly rather than through MX record lookups). - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe xmail" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For general help: send the line "help" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
