July 22

How Does Email Land in My Inbox?

Thrive Message Archiving MX Record McAfee SaaS MX Logic Seems like magic doesn’t it? Most people haven’t really thought about how it works but they will certainly know when it doesn’t work. There are many stops in the journey of an email before you see that envelope in your system tray, but there is one crucial stop that is worth mentioning – the MX record.

What is an MX Record?

The MX record (Mail eXchanger) is similar to a phone book for other email servers to find you. When someone sends you an email, their mail server takes a look at the domain of your email address. In my case, we’re talking about the @thrivenetworks.com. The server receives a response as to where that mail is supposed to go. In our case, it heads over to McAfeeSaaS (formerly MXLogic) to see if you are sending something legitimate or perhaps a good deal on gold watches. McAfeeSaaS then delivers that legitimate mail over to our mail server and, magic!… its in my inbox.

Skipping the Middle Man

You could tell the servers out there on the big wild internet not to bother with any filtering like McAfeeSaaS and send it right to my mail server. That would be quicker wouldn’t it? Let’s skip the middle man. I assure you that this is one case you don’t want to do that.

Consider an instance where your internet is down or worst something has happened to your office. All of a sudden you’ve got bigger problems. Having an MX record that points to just your one mail server address is horrible idea. This leads to really embarrassing bounceback messages that make it look like you don’t have your IT act together. This might sound like a giant ad for McAfeeSaaS’s Message Continuity. The fact remains that no matter what method of mail filtering you use or who your IT provider is, take a moment and make sure you have some redundancy for all this email magic. Interesting in learning more about how Thrive Message Archiving can help your business? Click here to see how it works!

If you’d like to lookup your MX records, head over to http://www.mxtoolbox.com and type in your domain name. Hopefully, you’ll be pleased with the results. If not, we can help.