What is mail exchange record

A Mail Exchanger Record (MX Record) is a type of DNS record that specifies the mail server responsible for accepting email messages on behalf of a domain name. In other words, it's a record that tells the world where to send email messages intended for a particular domain.

Here's how it works:

1. When you send an email to [email protected], your email client looks up the MX record for the "example.com" domain.
2. The MX record points to the mail server responsible for accepting email messages for that domain. This is usually a mail server hosted by the domain's registrar, a third-party email service provider, or the domain's own mail server.
3. The mail server then receives the email message and processes it according to its configuration.

MX records are essential for email delivery because they allow email clients to route email messages to the correct mail server. Without an MX record, email messages would not be delivered to the intended recipient.

Here's an example of an MX record:

example.com. IN MX 10 mail.example.com.

In this example:

• example.com is the domain name.
• IN specifies that this is an Internet-class MX record.
• MX specifies that this is a Mail Exchanger record.
• 10 is the preference value, which determines the order in which mail servers are tried. Lower values are tried first.
• mail.example.com is the hostname of the mail server responsible for accepting email messages for the example.com domain.

There are a few important things to note about MX records:

• A domain can have multiple MX records, each with a different preference value. This allows you to specify multiple mail servers to handle email for your domain.
• MX records can have a time-to-live (TTL) value, which determines how long the record remains valid before it needs to be updated.
• MX records can be used to route email messages to different mail servers based on the sender's IP address or other criteria.

I hope that helps!