Do I really need an MX record? (for e-mail to work)

[sm5w2 at hotmail.com]

Daniel Ström wrote:

> All i ever hear is excuses (we have to run this ourself) but in 99%
> that is absolutely not defendable from a  economical or practical
> standpoint.

You make absolutely no sense, especially since I have described our
situation.

We have been operating our own mail server since 1998.  It is an
NT4-server running post.office (made by defunct software.com).  It is
the single most reliable, most trouble-free, least resource-intensive
piece of business infrastructure we have.  Only our 12 year old HP
laser Jet printer comes close.  If I want to add, delete, modifiy user
accounts, I can do it in seconds.  If I want to add/remove any domains,
user-names, IP addresses from it's blocking list, I can do it in
seconds.  If I want to give users the ability to send/receive from
outside the local network, I can do it in seconds.  If I want to set up
100 separate e-mail addresses, I can do it in seconds (well, ok, maybe
minutes).  If I want to add 100 aliases to a single address, I can do
it.

If I want to go 1, 2, 3, 6 months without even turning on the screen of
the server, I can (and have) do that too.

After all that, why would I want to throw this away and have someone
else host our e-mail?  Why would I want to pay for that, when what I
have is already paid for?

(and PS:  We have a copy of NAV corporate edition running on the
server, and it intercept's 99% of viral attachments sitting in the
spool folders so end-users never get them)

> If you dont have the resources let someone else do it that has them
> and focus on your core buisness.

How did my questions about MX records turn into me not having enough
resources to run our own mail server?  Please explain.

> In this case judging by the setup (cable modem on a single IP) i
> would seriously doubt that running it in-house is  a wise decision.

Read what I said above.  Maybe some of you (or just Daniel Ström)
wrestle with difficult SMTP software that breaks on you on a daily
basis, or have an organization with more than 25 employees.  Maybe
that's what colors your impression of the difficulty in running your
own SMTP server.   That's not my experience.  I can't believe how easy
it was to pull our server out of our old location (ISDN, 64 dedicated
IP net-block) and get it back on-line through a single-IP ADSL
connection.