MX Record on a wildcard zone

[Pete Ehlke]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2002 at 02:49:01PM -0400, David Botham wrote:
> 
> I am not even going to ask why you would want to do this, but... see
> below
> 
There are plenty of perfectly valid reasons for wanting to publish a
wildcard MX for com.

Testing labs, for example, where you're evaluating mail server software.
The most common legitimate reason is in networks that communicate with
the outside world only through application proxies. You set up false
root servers that publish wildcard MX records for . pointing to a small
set of smtp servers that are allowed to communicate with the outside
world, and then simply deny outbound smtp from everyone else on the network.
You can avoid an incredible pile of mail server configuration hassles on
large networks like this.

For a very interesting discussion of such an architecture, see Vixie and
Scharf's paper "SENDS: a Tool for Managing Domain Naming and Electronic
Mail in a Large Organization" from the proceedings of LISA '94.

-P.