Overview
In a functional email communication system, the MX record is one of the least known components. Many IT professionals who manage servers might not know what an MX record is and how it works.
What is an MX Record?
MX stands for “mail exchanger”. An MX record is one of the critical DNS records of your domain. You will not receive an email if you forgot to create MX records or MX records did not point to the correct location.
Your domain will only be able to deliver internal e-mail if your MX Records aren’t configured correctly. Any external e-mail sent from foreign servers will not be delivered to your users due to the inability of these foreign servers to determine which server needs to be contacted.
Understanding the MX Record Format
A DNS record is made up of a number of pieces of information placed in different sections. Aside from domain’s mailing server names, other details can be transferred in this way as well:
<name> <ttl> <class> <type> <priority> <rdata>
<name>: The domain name appears here as the first field.
<ttl>: A time to live indicates how long the information will remain valid.
<class>: Network types are specified by the class field.
<type>: A DNS record (in this case MX) has been specified here.
<priority>: This identifies the priority of the email server; the lower the value, the more priority the email server has.
<rdata>: (Resource data) Mail server name can be found here.
In the record, all the fields are placed, on a single line, one after the other. You don’t have to use any special symbol to finish the registration; you just need a line break.
<name> <ttl> <class> <type> <priority> <rdata>
In practical terms, TTL and class fields are rarely displayed in records.
