Do I need an MX record for email forwarding?

I have my domain askerov.net registered with mydomain.com so that all incoming email is forwarded to my Gmail account using the email forwarding feature of mydomain.com. Note that I don't have Google Apps for this account, just regular email.

Things worked fine for a while except for the occasional bounce here and there, then a few days ago emails started bouncing all the time.

Here's what the configuration looks like in mydomain.com:

Nameservers:

ns1.mydomain.com
ns2.mydomain.com

MX record:

@   -->  mx.askerov.net  (priority 30)

NS records:

askerov.net  --> ns1.yourhostingaccount.com
askerov.net  --> ns2.yourhostingaccount.com

CNAME records:

none

A records:

mx --> 66.96.142.50
mx --> 66.96.142.51
mx --> 66.96.142.52
* --> 66.96.163.135
askerov.net --> 66.96.163.135

The question is, if I am simply forwarding email to [email protected] do I really need to have the MX record and the corresponding A records? I suspect that the MX stuff is causing my email delivery problems.

UPDATE

Email delivery is now working after I removed and re-added email forwarding. Not sure what effect that had on anything because the DNS settings remained unchanged as far as I can see. But at least I am now getting my email again!

Solution 1:

Your zone looks good as it is presented here.

The answer to your immediate question is yes, you need a MX record.

An MX record (literally, Mail eXchange) is a record that tells the rest of the internet which systems are willing to deal with mail destined for that domain.

For your zone, your MX record is:

@   -->  mx.askerov.net  (priority 30)

This means that the computer(s), mx.askerov.net, is(are) allegedly willing to deal with mail destined for your domain. Without this record, the internet at large will not know where to send askerov.net messages.

You then have to have the record(s) for mx.askerov.net to be defined, and the machines sitting on those addresses are presumably the mydomain.com systems that do the email forwarding.

Note that depending on what your MX record is pointing at, you might not need A records for the MX system you are using. For example, if you instead had your mx record pointing somewhere else, say

@ --> mx1.someplaceelse.local

...then you would not need the A record for mx1.someplaceelse.local -- it would be the responsibility of the domain managers of someplaceelse.local to publish the A record for mx1.

The answer to your real question, why are messages bouncing, depends on what the bounce message says.