[HN Gopher] Who Reads Your Email? ___________________________________________________________________ Who Reads Your Email? Author : binaryanomaly Score : 39 points Date : 2023-03-10 11:30 UTC (11 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.netmeister.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.netmeister.org) | voytec wrote: | I run my own MTA for some 23+ years now. Google (supposedly) | reads only my emails sent by their users and same can be said | about other similar services. | | > The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) relies on MX records | in the DNS to identify which server(s) it should hand the mail | off to. | | Not necessarily (this statement is corrected later in the post). | One of my domains have no MX records and I use it for email | extensively. As per RFC2821, SMTP falls back to A (and AAAA which | have not existed back then) when the FQDN does not have | corresponding MX record [1]. I have only found it to be an issue | with one web service which utilizes hunter.io, which marks my | email address as invalid due to lack of an MX record. Real mail | services work perfectly fine. They (hunter.io) have the following | untruthful statement in their FAQ [2]: | | >> We check if there are MX records on the domain. If there | aren't, the email address can't receive emails. | | Linked post reflects lack of requirement for the MX record | correctly: | | > As it turns out, no explicit MX record is indeed the most | widely found configuration: almost 119 million domains (58% of | all domains) are lacking any such resource record. Of those, 76 | million (64%) do have an IP address and thus could at least | theoretically receive mail | | [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2821#section-3.6 | | [2] https://hunter.io/email-verifier | jeffbee wrote: | > everymailbox.com domain has 398 MX records | | Ah yeah, these clowns. I distinctly recall, when rewriting the | DNS record cache used internally at Google (note: not the | resolver), thinking that surely no MX response would need more | than 8KiB, and finding these jokers. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-03-10 23:00 UTC)