> We have two records for our listserv site in our DNS file. 
>  
> listserv        IN      MX      10 spamav.magma.ca.
>  
> listserv        IN      A       206.191.44.3
>  
> One is an A record, the other an MX record.  I have updated the A record twice since moving the application from different servers.  This allows us to access Listserv through a browser.  The MX record has been there since day 1 (about 12 years ago) and I’ve never updated it.   The domain on that MX record is being eliminated by our ISP.  The LSoft documentation says that you need an A record, “at a minimum”.
>  
> So, my question, can I delete the MX record with no impact to our email delivery?

The mail standards say that, when a mail server has mail to deliver to a domain, it should look for an MX record in DNS, and, if it finds one, it should attempt delivery there.  (This is a bit of a simplification of how it works, but is close enough for this discussion.)

However, if there is no MX record, then the mail server should look for an A record and attempt delivery to that IP address instead.

It looks like 206.191.44.3 is accepting incoming mail for LISTSERV, so getting rid of the MX record should not prevent mail from getting to LISTSERV.

There are two things you might be concerned about, though.

- Many sites tend to view mail from domains that don’t have an MX record with some suspicion, so LISTSERV’s mail might be more likely to end up in spam folders, or more likely to be rejected outright.  If you want the LISTSERV server to handle its own mail, you can set up an MX record like:

listserv	IN	MX	10 listserv.example.com

(replacing ‘listserv.example.com’ with the LISTSERV server’s actual name) and that should work around this problem.

The other concern is:

- I’m guessing that spamav.magma.ca is some kind of anti-virus gateway that is scanning incoming mail for spam and viruses, and then delivers only ‘legitimate’ mail to the lISTSERV server.  Since you’ll be eliminating that gateway, it’s possible that more spam will make it through to LISTSERV.

-jwgh
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