

Understanding email routing (i.e. MX-records) - mvip
http://wireload.net/2011/12/understanding-email-routing-i-e-mx-records/

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blrgeek
It's a lot more fun that that, a single hop is barely 'routing' :)

For bonus points

Go back in history to when mail was _literally_ routed hop by hop through
SMTP? How'd that work?

What is the sending SMTP client expected to do when the server is unreachable?

Have you seen the headers of a mail your receive on gmail? How many smtp hops
_inside_ gmails network?

In an enterprise, how many smtp servers does your email hit before it exits?

And that's partly how the horror of sendmail evolved :) Not even going into
handling multiple email protocols and incompatible encoding types.

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gurraman
Would've been nice with a little more meat .. like convering all the steps
performed when detecting the actual SMTP servers (including connection
attempts, alternative lookups when no mx records exist etc).

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mvip
While that may be a fun read, it's hardly relevant for the average user (or
even admin). If you're at that level, I suggest reading relevant the RFCs. :)

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eigenvector
If I write an article called "Understanding how websites work" where I just
regurgitate the definition of an A record can I be on the frontpage of HN too?

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bradleyland
If you receive a sufficient number of up-votes, yes. I would recommend using
simple language, and avoid digressing too deeply in to networking concepts.
Keep in mind that HN is full of hackers, but it's also full of product people,
sales people, and new-comers.

This is a good high-level write up for people who might know a little about
how DNS works because they've configured a domain, but don't know a lot of
detail about the different record types. I can see how a lot of people would
find it interesting.

