MX records send all email to the lowest priority
I have set up my records to send to Exchange and my private email, the day of the setup it was working perfect until yesterday when suddenly Cloudflare change my settings and now I cannot replicate my configuration.
Hello guys,
I was not able to post my MX records sample for a better understanding, to then some of you kindly could help me.
my current settings are these and supposed to be working great according to the documentation, but isn’t.
Record type Hostname Priority Value
MX example.com 2 example-com0i.mail.protection.outlook.com
MX example.com 1 mail.example.com
TXT example.com v=spf1 include:example.com include:secureserver.net ~all"
could anyone please, kindly let me know how can I setup the MX records to instead to directing all emails to one of the other, instead, send according to the existent mailbox on either server?
Cloudflare doesn’t update/ change DNS records. If you believe they have changed you can review your audit log for what the change was and where it was made from.
These is no way in DNS to specify [email protected] is on server an and [email protected] is on server b. You would need to configure the individual mail servers to forward between themselves.
Thank you for the reply, the audit log, has been of great help.
About what dns, with all due respect I think is not entirely true, please refers to read about two or more MX records, and the correct assignment of TXT v=spf1 record which is for this exact same reason to have two or more mail server prividers.
You need to read a bit more about two or more MX records.
The priority shows what order of priority of the inbound mail servers that you, as a domain owner, want the senders to be trying to deliver the message to, with lowest number being highest (e.g. first) priority.
When you’re having multiple MX records like this, …
Senders (that are following the standards) will try the first MX (lowest number, highest priority), which in your example is “mail.example.com”, and if that delivery is successful, everything is good, and the sender WILL NEVER try to deliver that specific message again.
If the delivery to “mail.example.com” is unsuccessful, such as e.g. due to connection interruptions, the sender will re-try the next one in order of the priority (0, 1, 2, 3, …), until a delivery can successfully be made.
So when the delivery towards the server “mail.example.com” failed, the sender will re-try on “example-com0i.mail.protection.outlook.com”, according to your example.
The first mail server, in the order of the priority (and successful delivery), is the one that is winning the delivery for that specific message, when you have multiple MX records.
If you require two or more different mail servers (e.g. “mail.example.com” and “example-com0i.mail.protection.outlook.com”) to be synchronized, then you will need to handle the synchronization between them on your own.
That awesome advice by @cscharff could for example be one way, to handle the synchronization between multiple servers, if that is required for your set up.
Such kind of “internal” forwarding can also be used, if you require “user1” and “user2” to be on separate storage servers.
But all these things are something you need to handle after the message has been delivered to either of the MX records.
Multiple MX records allows senders to “failover” to another mail server, and (hopefully) still be able to deliver the message, if one (or more) mail servers are unreachable.
Multiple MX records will NOT make the senders deliver the message to all 2, 3, 4, …, 10 (or how many different) MX records that you have set up.
One single message will only be delivered one time, and NOT once per MX record.