Point domain name of my zone to name in somebody else's zone?

[Tony Finch]

Dave Warren <davew at hireahit.com> wrote:
> On 2014-05-08 15:09, Mark Andrews wrote:

> > But that does not help when you want a MX record at the apex or
> > some other record at the apex.
>
> I'd argue that it does -- Since the record is now CNAME'd, the MX record is
> now under the control of the destination of the CNAME record and MX records
> can still be set.

Unfortunately CNAME-pointing-at-MX is an interop disaster area owing to
different MTA's differing opinions about whether it makes sense to rewrite
email addresses in this situation. Avoid.

> I actually think that MX records were a boneheaded thing to do, had email
> started using SRV records in the first place we might be in a position now
> where using SRV records is the defacto standard if not the actual standard for
> all services. (No offense to the folks that made MX records happen, I realize
> that in historical context it was the correct decision and it solved the very
> immediate problem -- I'm just saying that in an ideal world, SRV records
> instead of MX records would solved the same problem in a more generic fashion,
> and would have pushed us to a better place for other protocols)

It is interesting to look at the old RFCs and see how many false starts it
took to get to the MX design. Mail was the first heavily virtualized
application so I think their failure to generalize was forgivable,
especially since they were also dealing with the massive problem of
gatewaying between dozens of balkanized mail networks.

http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/net-directory/documents/JANET-Mail-Gateways.ps

Tony.
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