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I am following some instructions in pointing the email server to the domain. CName should resolve to a named server, where pop will points to a server named pop.mx***.com. Then why do I need also to set MX to mx1.mx***.com? There these two different server, or is pop.mx***.com a service inside the server mx1.mx***.com? And do I really need to create a CNAME record for each of the service (e.g. pop to pop.mx***.com, smtp to smtp.mx***.com) or can I point them to the same mail server (e.g. pop, smtp and imap to mx***.com?

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    CNAME is an alias, MX actually defines the server which will handle mail exchange
    – Sathyajith Bhat ♦
    Commented Oct 20, 2017 at 18:24
  • think of it like A CNAME extends an A rec by giving it an alias, so the CNAME points to the A rec. An MX record affects the domain by identifying the Mailserver that serves it which may not be a host with an A rec in that zone. a client that needs the MX record for use, will query for the MX, get the result, and then use it to query for the A rec on the returned name. that way if the server indicated in the MX is not part of that zone, and perhaps handled by another DNS server, the name is still resolvable to IP by the client.
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Oct 20, 2017 at 18:40

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MX records are entirely different to CNAME records.

An MX records is a Mail eXChanger record - it directs mail servers where to send mail. They also have an additional field set with a number - if you have multiple mail servers this number is used to set the order in which they are tried (lower numbers are tried first. If you only have 1 mx record the number can be anything, but is normally 10). MX records are not generally used except by mail servers.

A CNAME "more-or-less" points to another domain. They are not generally used by mail servers, but can be used by mail clients to find the name of the mail server. There are some gotchas when using CNAMES - the most common trap to avoid is to not use a CNAME on an origin/root - ie it's a bad idea to set up a CNAME for example.com, but setting it up for www.example.com or mail.example.com is normally ok.

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