ARE YOUR MX RECORDS
CONFIGURED
CORRECTLY? Decorative underline

Broken MX records mean missed emails. Scan your domain's mail exchange configuration in seconds.

Check priority values, redundancy, and server reachability - all in one free scan.

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MX record scan illustration

Why MX Records Matter -
More Than You Think

MX records are the postal addresses of your email infrastructure. A misconfigured or missing MX record means nobody can send you email - and you won't even know it's happening.

Email routing Misconfigured MX records silently drop inbound emails - customers can't reach you
Redundancy No redundancy means a single server outage stops all inbound email delivery
Priority Wrong priority values cause email to route to backup servers unnecessarily, adding delays

What DMARCFlow's MX Checker Verifies

  • ✓ MX Record Existence - confirms your domain has at least one valid MX entry in DNS
  • ✓ Priority Values - validates that priority numbers are correctly set for primary and backup servers
  • ✓ Redundancy Check - verifies at least two MX records exist for failover protection
  • ✓ Server Reachability - tests whether your mail exchange servers actually respond
  • ✓ TTL Values - reviews time-to-live settings that affect DNS propagation speed

Why Use DMARCFlow's Free MX Checker

Professional-grade MX validation - no account required, instant results.

Instant lookup
Instant DNS Lookup

Live DNS query against authoritative servers - not cached data - for accurate, real-time results.

Redundancy analysis
Redundancy Analysis

Automatically checks whether you have sufficient backup mail exchange servers to survive an outage.

Priority check
Priority Validation

Verifies that your MX priority values are correctly ordered so email routes to the right server first.

Actionable advice
Actionable Guidance

Clear explanations of every finding and step-by-step fix instructions for your DNS provider.

The Cost of Getting
MX Records Wrong

See what happens when MX records are misconfigured versus properly validated.

WITHOUT CHECKING
Inbound emails bounce silently Single point of failure in mail routing Wrong priority causes unnecessary fallback routing Unreachable servers go undetected for days Lost business opportunities from missed emails
WITH DMARCFLOW
Instant visibility into MX configuration Redundancy validated - no single point of failure Priority order verified for optimal routing Server reachability confirmed in real time Clear fix instructions for any DNS provider Confidence that inbound email will arrive Free, instant, no account required

Don't wait until emails start bouncing.
Check your MX records now - it's free.

Frequently Decorative underline Asked
Questions

Everything you need to know about MX records and email routing

MX (Mail Exchange) records are DNS entries that tell the internet which mail servers should receive email for your domain. When someone sends an email to user@yourdomain.com, the sending mail server looks up your MX records to find out where to deliver the message. Without valid MX records, your domain cannot receive email.

The priority value (also called "preference") determines the order in which mail servers are tried. Lower numbers mean higher priority - a server with priority 10 is tried before one with priority 20. If the primary (lowest priority number) server is unreachable, sending servers automatically try the next one in line.

Best practice is to have at least two MX records pointing to different mail servers. This ensures redundancy - if one server is down for maintenance or experiencing an outage, email continues to be delivered to the backup server. Most cloud email providers (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) automatically configure multiple MX records for you.

A TTL (Time to Live) of 3600 seconds (1 hour) is a widely accepted default for MX records. If you're planning to change your mail provider, temporarily lower the TTL to 300-600 seconds a day beforehand so changes propagate faster. After migration, raise it back to 3600 or higher to reduce DNS query load.

No. MX records must point to a hostname (like mail.example.com), not an IP address. The hostname must itself resolve to an IP via an A or AAAA record. Pointing an MX record directly to an IP address is a DNS standards violation and will cause email delivery failures with many mail servers.

MX records handle inbound email routing (who can receive email for your domain), while SPF and DMARC handle outbound email authentication (verifying that you are who you say you are when sending email). They work together as part of a complete email security stack. A domain needs correct MX records plus properly configured SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for both reliable delivery and protection from spoofing.

An MX server can appear unreachable for several reasons: the server is temporarily down, a firewall is blocking port 25 (SMTP), the hostname in the MX record does not resolve to a valid IP, or the server's SSL/TLS certificate has expired. If your primary MX server is unreachable, senders will either queue the email and retry or fail over to a secondary MX record if one exists.