MX (Mail Exchange) records direct email to the correct mail servers for your domain. Misconfigured MX records cause email delivery failures, bounces, and lost messages. Our free MX lookup tool queries your domain's MX records, validates mail server reachability, checks priority ordering, and identifies potential issues with your email routing.
Comprehensive analysis powered by Vysiro's scanning engines
MX record priority and preference lookup
Mail server reachability testing
Reverse DNS (PTR) validation
SMTP banner verification
Backup MX configuration check
Mail server TLS support detection
IPv4 and IPv6 mail server resolution
Mail routing path visualization
Get results in seconds with our automated scanning process
Enter your domain name in the scanner
We query DNS for all MX records and their priorities
Each mail server is resolved to its IP addresses
We test connectivity and SMTP response on each server
Reverse DNS and TLS support are verified
You get a complete mail routing analysis with recommendations
Everything you need to know about mx record lookup
MX (Mail Exchange) records are DNS records that specify which mail servers accept email for your domain and in what priority order. When someone sends email to your domain, the sending server looks up your MX records to find where to deliver the message.
Lower numbers mean higher priority. Set your primary mail server to priority 10 and backup servers to higher numbers (20, 30). This ensures email goes to your primary server first and falls back to backups if it is unavailable.
Common causes include missing or incorrect MX records, unreachable mail servers, full mailboxes, spam filtering, and DNS propagation delays. Our MX lookup verifies your records are correct and your mail servers are responding properly.
While not required, backup MX servers prevent email loss during primary server outages. Without backups, emails bounce after the sending server's retry period expires (typically 4-5 days). Most email hosting providers include redundancy automatically.
No, MX records must not point to CNAME records according to RFC 2181. They should point directly to A or AAAA records. Using CNAMEs for MX targets can cause delivery failures with some mail servers.
When you sign up for email hosting (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, etc.), the provider gives you MX records to add to your DNS. These records point to the provider's mail servers, routing all incoming email through their systems for delivery to your mailboxes.
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