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I've seen articles of "different subdomains for different MX".

But here, I want the mail for the same domain, say, @abc.com

The situation is:

Originally, I use Live Mail(MSN) to host my emails, and already set MX for it;

Now, I want to use some of the Google App features, So I need to set MX for Google Mail.

Can both of the two work together and well?

Thanks a Lot!

Cedric

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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

While you can set up more than one MX server for a given domain, this is purely about a backup function to receive mail when one server goes down. It's not possible to let two totally different services both handle your mail for the same domain, and IMHO it doesn't make any sense to even try. If you like Googles features better, switch to Google, otherwise you have to live with what Live Mail offers.

What might work is to forward mail from Live Mail to another domain hosted by Google, but then you would need to manage two separate services.

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Actually, it is. You can have each mailserver also checking for any domain mail from each other, in case any senders are using the lower-priority MX when the higher-priority one is available. – mfinni Dec 14 '10 at 15:06
Have fun convincing Google and Microsoft that you want to do this with their service... – SvW Dec 14 '10 at 15:19
Certainly not something you would do with hosted email. If you were running your own however, that's how it can be done. – mfinni Dec 14 '10 at 15:25
1  
@mfinni What a load of bull. Google Mail certainly supports forwarding. – Tom O'Connor♦ Dec 14 '10 at 15:38
@Tom - ok, i have little experience with hosted email. I was granting Sven that it might be more complicated, but he was apparently wrong and I shouldn't have humored him. – mfinni Dec 14 '10 at 17:37
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up vote 1 down vote

Dual MX records are used for backup purposes, i.e. if you list more than 1 MX record for a domain, any host attempting to deliver email for that domain will only attempt such delivery to 1 MX at a time.

In order to achieve a dual delivery as described in your question you will need an SMTP service that receives email for your domain/s, and that SMTP service would perform delivery to multiple endpoints, e.g. for each message it delivers once to Google Apps and once to Live mail.

This is not common and almost certainly not a good idea, maybe you can clarify what it is you are trying to achieve?

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Dual delivery is common enough that Google Apps supports it and shows you how you can set it up. It's just not done through MX records. – Lèse majesté Feb 12 '12 at 10:06

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