How to find a Mail Server of a specific domain

Barry Margolin barry.margolin at level3.com
Tue Sep 2 18:42:51 UTC 2003


In article <bj2lkk$1etb$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
Oliver Münchow <omuenchow at notforspammers.de> wrote:
>Hi NG,
>
>hope this is the right group to solve my prob. If not, please let me know
>(and maybe tell me where i'm in right place).
>
>My simple question is: Who to find a mail server for a specific domain??
>A simple way would be to act like nslookup. Just connect to specific DNS
>Server (e.g. lserver m.root-servers.net) and ask for all mx entries of a
>specific domain (e.g. ls -t mx hotmail.com). But this will always result in
>a 'Query refused' message. So how know all these mail servers out there to
>which server they have to deliver their mails of a specifc domain??

You shouldn't be using "ls" -- that performs a zone transfer; many servers
refuse this.  Just do an ordinary query:

dig hotmail.com mx

or, if you really must use nslookup:

nslookup
>set q=mx
>hotmail.com

You shouldn't need to connect to a specific DNS server; your local caching
server should do all that for you.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barry.margolin at level3.com
Level(3), Woburn, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.


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