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

[sm5w2 at hotmail.com]

Kurt Boyack wrote:

> > Having MX record is like having standard mailboxes at the entrance
> > of your building. If you don't have that, the postman will have no
> > problem taking the letter to your apartment and drop the letter through
> > the letterhole on the door.
> >
> > Likewise, the annoying advertisement leaflet sender here in Hong Kong
> > will have not problem drop the leaflets in the letterhole either.
>
> Spammers will find and use SMTP servers even if they do not have
> MX records. MX records are not required to send mail to a domain,
> and you will get junk mail even if you do not have them.

You are both out to lunch because (as I have REPEATEDLY stated) my
experience has shown that at this point (3 weeks after changing my
server's IP address and going with an MX record) that spam to my domain
has dropped by 75-80%.  This is spam from your typical residential
cable or ADSL dynamic-IP source (ie "zombie").

My server's SMTP software has an internal black-list mechanism (based
on domain and IP) and those lists are well populated with many entries
I have hand-entered over the past 7 years.  That leaves me with spam
that comes from sources that are too trouble-some (or too variable) to
enter into the list (no need to go into a discussion about hooking into
third-party spam-blocking mechanisms because that is not the point
here).

(I could look at my logs at this point to tally up all the connection
attempts that were rejected based on IP or domain, but again that is
not the point).

Basically what I'm saying is that for the spam which I have found
difficult to block (and which was CONSISTENTLY giving me 50 spams per
day) has now dropped to between 5 and 10 spams per day since my MX
record became non-existant and the IP of my server was changed.

I will keep track of this situation over time in order to see if my
spam load returns to what it was when I had an MX record.