Exercise: Checking a Domain’s Mail Server with nslookup

Outlook

The mx in the -type=mx flag stands for Mail Exchanger record, which essentially means the SMTP server.

There is a lot more that nslookup can be used for. Here’s the manpage for nslookup if you want to learn more.

Ignore what authoritative and non-authoritative mean for now. You’ll understand them when we get to DNS.

Try any other domain of your choice! Here are a couple of very popular ones.

Gmail

In this case, one of the SMTP servers for Gmail is alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.

Yahoo!

Let’s study pull protocols like POP and IMAP in some detail in the next lesson.