Re: Newbie question: Exim - trouble receiving incoming emails

[Jon Dowland <lists@alcopop.org>]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 12:52:01AM +1100, Duncan McDonald
wrote:
> As I said I'm fairly new to system administration so I'm
> not sure what an MX record is.

Domains are mapped to IP addresses via DNS records. DNS
records come in a variety of types: the most common being
the 'A' record, which specifies an address. But there's also
the MX record, which specifies a host that is responsible
for receiving mail for the domain in question.  So, some
examples

	jon@ankh:~$ dig +short alcopop.org mx
	10 alcopop.org.
	20 despayre.org.

That means if you want to send mail to my domain
alcopop.org, you should try to connect to host alcopop.org,
and failing that, despayre.org as a backup.

	jon@ankh:~$ dig +short greenmars.org mx
	0 smtp.secureserver.net.
	10 mailstore1.secureserver.net.

Here, if you want to mail greenmars.org, you should connect
to smtp.secureserver.net. This is because I have the
greenmars.org domain "parked". Mail to this domain will not
reach me.

If your domain's MX record doesn't point at your server, you
will need to get your ISP to update the DNS.


-- 
Jon Dowland