how does email get routed to a self-hosted domain?

Hi all,

I am new to self-hosting a domain, but by checking out the postings on this site, the information i gathered has been really helpful. I do however, still have a doubt as to how emails are routed to the email server hosted on my domain.

For example, I have a domain called abc.com registered. As far as I understand, abc.com is actually pointed to the nameservers that I have setup at my static internet IP right? So say I have ns1.abc.com and ns2.abc.com setup.

Now if i have an email server at emails.abc.com and this has been registered to both my nameservers (ns1 and ns2), there should be no problem accessing the emails.abc.com machine.

However, I noticed that email addresses typically just specifies the domain name, ie. abc.com. So how would the email get routed to my email server which is emails.abc.com? Is there like some sort of naming convention that every mail server has to adhere to for emails to work?

Appreciate any replies I can get on this matter.

Best rgds,
Steven.

Mail is routed according to MX records. In your example, you would need to set up MX records for abc.com on the nameservers ns1.abc.com and ns2.abc.com.

Caveat: The MX record cannot resolve to a CNAME, and cannot resolve to an IP address. It must resolve to an A record (e.g.. mail.abc.com). See http://www.rscott.org/dns/mx.html for further information.

thanks alexgreg..

will try that out.