Configuring Your MX Records
- What are MX records?
- Where should I point my MX records?
- How can I see which MX machines are running?
What are MX records?
-
When an email is sent the machine which performs the delivery needs to know where to deliver the message. This is done by looking up a special type of record in DNS - an MX record.
An MX record for a domain specifies which machine(s) handle email addressed to a particular domain.
As an example the domain example.com might have an MX record of smtp.example.com - which would tell every server in the world that when they want to send email to bob@example.com they should deliver their message to the machine smtp.example.com.
Where should I point my MX records?
-
If you wish us to scan your mail you should update the MX records for your domain to include the following two addresses in the following order:
- incoming.mail-scanning.com
- 85.17.183.227
- 89.16.163.119
- 208.82.100.217
- backup.mail-scanning.com
- 89.16.163.120
Important Note
The IP addresses are listed for reference, and in case you want to setup MX security. When you update your DNS records only refer to the hosts by the two names.
Once you've done this all future mails will be delivered to your server through ours. (You should remove any existing records, so mail isn't delivered directly.)
If, once DNS has updated, you're still seeing mail coming directly from remote senders and not routed through our machines please consider restricting your mailserver.
- incoming.mail-scanning.com
How can I see which MX machines are running?
We run regular, automated, tests of our MX machines to ensure they are functioning as expected.
Any unexpected downtime of either MX machine will result in immediate attention.
If you'd like to check our status you may do so via the following status page, which updates every five minutes: