The Domain Name System (DNS) is like the telephone book of the Internet. Imagine you want to visit a website, such as www.yourdomain.com. Instead of knowing the IP address (a string of numbers that identifies a specific server on the Internet) of that website, you simply type in the human-friendly name (www.yourdomain.com) and the DNS system will help find the corresponding IP address.
DNS records consist of various fields that provide information about the domain. In addition to information about the name of the mail server for a particular domain, other information can also be transmitted.
Class (<class>)
The class of the entry specifies the scope of the entry. This entry is rather optional, as only the Internet is now considered. At the time when the resource records were introduced, there were still the two classes Hesiod (HS) and Chaos (CH). However, both networks are no longer operated today, which is why the field either remains empty or the abbreviation "IN" is always used.
Priority (<priority>)
Especially for larger projects, it can make sense to run several mail servers in parallel. In this way, you can ensure fail-safety and redundancy in order to maintain email communication at all times. The priority can be used to control the order in which the mail servers of a domain are to be addressed. This means that several servers can have the same priority and divide the incoming load between them or you can assign different priorities in order to specify a sequence. If the first server is not available or cannot handle the load, the server with the next highest priority is used.
Type (<type>)
The type of the entry specifies what kind of information the entry contains. In this case, we use the type "MX".
Data (<rdata>)
The data of the entry contains the actual information associated with the entry. Depending on the type of record, the data can be an IP address, a host name or other information. For an MX record, the name of the mail server is always specified in the form of an FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name).
An MX record (Mail Exchange Record) is a special type of record in the DNS that is used to determine which server should receive emails for a particular domain. Let's say you have an email address like info@yourdomain.com. When someone sends an email to this address, the DNS needs to know which mail server to forward the email to. This is where the MX record comes into play. The structure of an MX record in a DNS zone is as follows:
yourdomain.com. IN MX 10 mail1.mailserver.com.
By using several MX records for a domain, you can increase redundancy and reliability. If the primary server is unavailable, the system automatically accesses the secondary server with the next highest priority and attempts to deliver the message there. Please make absolutely sure that your MX records always point to the correct destination so that you can receive emails.
Example
In this example, we use the made-up mail server of yourdomain.com. An email address could be info@yourdomain.com, for example. To send an email, the sender's server would send a corresponding DNS query to the name servers of the domain yourdomain.com. In response to the question as to which MX records the domain yourdomain.com has, it receives the following:
yourdomain.com. IN MX 10 mail1.mailserver.com.
yourdomain.com. IN MX 10 mail2.mailserver.com.
yourdomain.com. IN MX 30 mail3.mailserver.com.
As the first two mail servers in this example have the same priority, the requests are distributed equally to both. The third mail server is only contacted if the first two mail servers are unavailable or the load on both servers is so great that they can no longer cope with the task.
In order to use EuropeanMX for your incoming messages, it is mandatory to adjust the MX records in the DNS settings of your domain at your domain provider. Without changing the MX-records the use of the incoming filter is impossible! The following entries are required:
English
Deutsch
Arabic
Armenian
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Estonian
Finnish
French
Georgian
Greek
Icelandic
Italian
Latvian
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Ukrainian
10 mx1.europeanmx.eu.
20 mx2.europeanmx.eu.
30 mx3.europeanmx.eu.
40 mx4.europeanmx.eu.The numbers 10 - 40 represent the respective priority.
Please pay attention to the points at the end of the entries, which may be necessary depending on your provider.
These 4 entries should be the only ones of type "MX", others may have to be deleted. It is best to make a note of the original MX entries so that you can restore them later. If you have problems to store the MX records, please contact your provider.
If you want to receive your messages only via servers within the EU, please contact our support.
The update of the DNS records can take up to 24 hours.
Here we have compiled an overview of the most important hosting providers and their instructions: