Kevin and I agree on this. Unless you have a better choice
go to
www.Register.Com and purchase your Domain name.
They will provide the DNS servers as part of the price --
they will also give you a "little" web site (5 pages or something)
that will hold your place on the web until you get a web site
of your own (you can of course edit it, disable it, or move it to your
place at any time.)
They have a web interface to 'YOUR' DNS servers at their site;
you add A-host records, MX-records for your email server etc.
Then you can run your Exchange or other SMTP to catch email
on your own machine -- it's easy if you have a STATIC IP, or...
If you have a dynamic IP, you can also go to (many place but
here's a good one) DynDNS.org (<== ORG) and get a free
account to register a name with them that point to yours dynamicly
addressed server.
This name is something like [ smtp.dynalias.com ] so you have one
more step:
Go back to Register.com and make your MX record point to
THAT name (you picked at DynDNS.org). You can also
add CNAME to that name for things like WWW or FTP if
you want that to work also.
How it works?
When I want to send you an email -- assume you are (e-mail address removed)
My email server receives the outbound email and hunts your DNS
(at Register.Com) for the MX record.
[In this scenario the email server is probably using it's own DNS
server to help with all this resolution but we'll simplify.]
How does it find Register.com? It went to the root of the Internet
and asked the "." (root) servers how to find .Com DNS servers,
from there it asked how to find 'your.com' DNS and ended up
asking it for that MX record.
Let's say the MX points to YourServer.DynAlias.Com.
Ok, so it's got the NAME of the mail server (MX record) but now
we need the ADDRESS -- my email server (with the help of it's
DNS server, remember) goes through a similar process and finds
that You.DynAlias.Com address record which we can contact
directly using IP routing.
Cool, right?
My server calls your server with email and we can "do lunch."
<grin>