MX records

MX stands for mail exchange. An MX record is a line in your DNS records that names the servers responsible for accepting email sent to your domain. When someone emails [email protected], their mail system looks up your domain’s MX records first, finds the server they point to, and hands the message off there. No MX record, no delivery.

This is a separate system from the one that decides where your website lives. A domain’s A record can point to one server for the website while its MX records point to a completely different provider for mail. That split is normal and, for most small businesses, exactly right: your web host does not need to be in the business of running mail servers, and vice versa.

Why it matters to you

MX records are invisible until they are wrong, and when they are wrong the failure is quiet. A visitor’s contact form email, a client’s reply to an invoice, a booking confirmation, all of it can bounce or vanish with no obvious symptom on your end. You just stop getting messages you expected.

This matters most during a move: switching to Google Workspace, changing hosts, or consolidating business email onto your own domain after using a personal address. Any of those changes can touch MX records, and a mistake during the move is the single most common way small businesses lose mail for a day or two without noticing right away.

How I use it

When I move a business onto its own domain for email, I set the MX records exactly as the mail provider specifies, in the priority order they give, and I verify delivery both ways before calling the change done. I do not guess at values or copy them from an unrelated setup. Mail providers publish exact records for a reason, and a typo in an MX record fails silently rather than throwing an obvious error.

I also check what is already there before changing anything. If a business has old MX records pointing at a provider they no longer use, I confirm nothing is still relying on them before removing the clutter, because DNS propagation means a change here does not take effect everywhere at once.

What it looks like in practice

You will never open your MX records unless something is being migrated. The way you notice they are right is that mail simply works: a test message sent from an unrelated account and address arrives in the right inbox within a minute or two. That quiet, boring success is the entire goal.

If I am ever moving your mail, I test before I tell you it is done, sending real messages through and confirming they land, rather than trusting that the settings alone are proof enough.