Configuring DNS for Use with E-Mail
DNS service set up with mail exchange (MX) records allows mail to be sent to the correct host on your network. Whether you need to set this up depends on your situation:
- Your Internet service provider supplies the DNS server for your network. If this is the case, your ISP can set up and host MX records for you. All you do is let them know your Mail server's IP address and domain name.
- Your network has DNS service running on a non-Mac server. In this case, the server administrator creates an MX record for your Mail server that's hosted on the DNS server.
- The DNS service is running on one of your Mac OS X Servers. Use Server Admin to access any of these servers to create an MX record.
If you're in the last case, you actually can do without MX records if you really want to. To do this, you need to include the mail server's hostname in the e-mail addresses of your users. For example, with MX records configured, a user's e-mail address might look like fred@acme.com. Without MX records, you must include the mail server's hostname (fred@our-server.acme.com).
The problem is that if you ever change your mail server, you have to change all your users' e-mail addresses.
If you're going to use MX records, you also need to make sure that DNS has a machine record, a DNS entry that identifies your mail server on the network.
This section looks at creating ...
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