>  Somebody tried to tell me today that 35-40 % of the mail servers out
> there will ignore the "MX" record and use the ip address for "myname.com"
> when sending mail and hence end up finding no mail server and fail -->
> they will look for mail services on the web server.

SMTP servers that don't support MX records are pretty rare these days.
Using MX records should work just fine.