Message Board

Donating MX Entries

Traffic on donated mx's

Author: C.Nilsen (2 Sep 13 1:45pm)

Greetings,

I'm considering donating an mx record but I am concerned about whether it will get me in trouble over bandwidth usage with my host.
Will it only serve as a pointer to your servers without any traffic passing through "my" server?

Re: Traffic on donated mx's

Author: H.User1325 (3 Sep 13 8:58am)

Your host will not see any of the traffic going to your donated MX.

When you donate a MX record the DNS files are updated to translate your mail domain name to the IP address where "your" mail server is located. In this case "your" mail server is controlled/hosted by Project Honey Pot NOT your host where your website is located.

A longer answer involves how the internet uses DNS servers to find things on the internet.
The internet uses IP addresses (i.e. 213.123.456.101) to locate things. No one wants to remember something like that for your_domain_name. The DNS is a big lookup table that translates your_domain_name to an IP address (a.b.c.d) when someone needs to know where your website is so they can see what you have to say. The same thing happens when someone wants to send an email, except the MX record is used to find where your_domain_name mail server is located (IP address w.x.y.z).

The DNS service is a distributed service not connected to the bandwidth you are paying for with your host.

Thanks for your donation and welcome to the fight!

Re: Traffic on donated mx's

Author: C.Nilsen (3 Sep 13 10:49am)

Excellent. Thank you very much for your reply.
I'll get the mx donated.

Re: Traffic on donated mx's

Author: H.Master2 (21 Oct 13 6:09pm)

Interesting that 16 of the 27 IPs which looked up the MX record for my donated MX are opendns.com

and with rare exception, that is the only domain which opendns queries on my DNS servers.