Can I have a different mail server for each subdomain?

Question

Basically, some GoDaddy DNS help text has me scratching my head. Godaddy's DNS service says, "You cannot set up your domain name to use more than one mail provider at a time." But it doesn't talk about more than one subdomain name, with one mail provider per subdomain.

I think I need more than one mail server in my organization, where different subdomains use different mail servers.

That is, someone in my organization has gotten the fire to use Google Apps for a mail server.

We already have an MX record which services some GoDaddy mail forwards like [email protected] and [email protected]. We don't want to distrurb those. Their owners are happy with them for the time being.

It is acceptable to Mr. Google Apps Fanboy if we set up a subdomain like staff.nonprofit.org and use that for his Google Apps mailserver. So he would have an email address like [email protected].

Given that there is already a priority 0 MX record pointed at the GoDaddy mail forwarding service, can I set up another priority 0 MX record pointed at the Google Apps mail server for email addresses on a new staff.nonprofit.org subdomain? Are priorities exclusive even for different subdomains?

If it cannot be at the same priority, do I need to make the subdomain MX record a higher priority than the domain MX record and have everything still work?

Han

The right answer was already given by chaos, I just want to add that "subdomain" is a word that can be misleading. There is no inheritance in the DNS. A subdomain does not inherit its parent MX (or anything else). A subdomain is a domain like any other one. – Blodget

In a Way, all domains are "sub-domains" of their respective .tld; i.e. nonprofit.org is subdomain of .org. Like @Blodget said, a subdomain is a domain like any other one. – Ribband

Answer 1

You can set up MX records on subdomains/hosts just fine, and you don't need to worry about their priority relative to the main domain's records; they don't interact.

Sibley

Hi, Can you share a doc or tell me how I will be able to do this ? I have a multi tenant architecture, I will be providing a different sub domain to all my clients, and each client will have a different Incoming Mail ID. Please help me out on how I can achieve this. – Jaan

Answer 2

different mx-records for different subdomains should work

Ayurveda