I’m trying to understand the process for mail flow for a project I’m doing. I understand that you register your domain with a vendor and they have something call MX records, but then it gets kind of fuzzy.
As the follow-up question, how does it work when two companies merge and I email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) and he responds back from [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])? What process would these two companies have gone through to make this happen?
In: Technology
For additional information read up on SMTP (that server he mentions) which is used for incomjng mail. Its quite simple and you can even send mail with just a telnet client. Once it’s stored/forwarded/filtered, it is then usually stored in mbox or other format on the mail server.
When you check your email, it uses a IMAP or POP3 service running on the mail server. This let’s you log in and retrieve your mail.
When you send an email, your email host needs to figure out where to send that email _too_. It does this by querying the DNS records to find out what IP address is hosting the mail server for the recipient. Your registrar will allow you to set the MX record, which basically says, “For emails that are going to @company.com, you need to talk to IP address 123.123.123.123.” Your email host then attempts to contact 123.123.123.123 on a specific port and deliver the email. So, the MX record is basically the entry in the master address book that links @company.com to the server that runs the @company.com mailboxes
As to your second question, the mail server can host multiple domains and have various routing rules between them. It isn’t too complex – I run a simple mail server that can do this.
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