MX record lookup
Looks up a domain
Every domain that receives mail publishes a list of the servers willing to accept it, and the order in which senders should try them. That list is the MX record. Type a domain and you will see exactly what the rest of the internet sees when it has something to deliver.
This one is not a browser tool. Reading DNS needs a resolver and a browser does not have one, so the domain you type is sent to our server, which does the lookup and sends back the answer. We do not log the domain, there is no account and no cookie involved, and nothing else about you is part of the request.
Reading the answer
What the priority number means
Lower is tried first. A sender sorts the list ascending, attempts the lowest, and only moves to the next if that server will not take the message. The actual values carry no meaning beyond their order — 10 and 20 behave exactly like 1 and 2, which is why most providers leave gaps: it makes room to slot a server in later without renumbering everything.
Two servers at the same priority are alternatives rather than a sequence. The sender picks between them, roughly evenly, which is how large providers spread inbound mail across a fleet.
Why a domain might list several
Redundancy, mostly. If the first server is down, a sender that finds a second one will use it rather than queueing the message for hours. A domain with exactly one MX is not misconfigured, but it has no fallback: when that host is unreachable, senders hold the mail and retry, and after a few days they give up and bounce it.
A higher-numbered “backup MX” used to be standard practice. It is much less common now, because a backup that merely queues mail and forwards it later tends to lose the spam filtering the primary would have applied.
No MX records is a real answer
If a domain publishes none, senders fall back to its A or AAAA record — the address the website is on — and try to deliver there. That is almost never intended, and on a domain you own it is worth fixing: either publish proper MX records or, if the domain should not receive mail at all, say so deliberately with a null MX (0 .), which tells senders to reject immediately instead of retrying for days.
What this cannot tell you
It cannot tell you whether mail to the domain will actually arrive. An MX record is a claim about where to deliver, not a promise that the server behind it is running, that the mailbox you have in mind exists, or that the message will survive the filtering on the other side.
It also says nothing about whether the domain is protected against someone forging mail from it. That is SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and they are separate records with separate answers.
Answers are cached for a few minutes so that a popular link does not turn into a flood of identical DNS queries. If you have just changed your records and still see the old ones, the result will say it came from the cache.
What the MX list tells a sender about you
More than most people expect. The MX record is public and it names your mail provider, so anyone who cares can learn which service handles your mail without asking. That is ordinary and unavoidable — it is how delivery works.
What is neither ordinary nor unavoidable is handing the same address to everyone who asks for one. Giving each sender a different address is the thing Maski does, and it means that when one of them leaks or starts selling you on, you switch off that one address instead of changing your mail provider.
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