I work at a mortgage company and we had an issue with not receiving external emails. I contacted our consulting company to look into the issue while I did at the same time. He rebooted the firewall and then I tried send and email from an external account and it didnt go through. I then checked mxtoolbox.com to see if our mx records were corrected and nothing showed up. I asked him if this could cause the issue and he said yes. Once the issue was fixed, he called and said that he rebooted the firewall again and that seemed to fix it or it fixed itself. I checked mxtoolbox again, and then there was a record.

QUESTION:

1.Can rebooting the firewall fix the issue?

2.Do you think that because there was no MX record that there was an issue.

3. Where are the mx records stored other than the server side where the site is hosted?

Note: the site is hosted off-site.

I doubt rebooting the firewall will fix the issue. It sounds like your MX records may be incorrect. The MX records are stored in the domain name servers (DNS) as a record. The best way to test this is to go to http://www.dnsreport.com/ and run both tests on your domain name (your whatever.com name). That will let you know if there are any DNS MX records and what they are. If there is a common issue is will also give you some usefull information. If it is in fact a DNS MX issue you can run a WHOIS lookup to see who maintains your DNS records and that can be done at Network Solutions www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp That should give you at least a email address to deal with if not a phone number. I hope this helps. Also since DNS is a caching technology it will take some time for DNS server accrossed the world to get the updated MX records so it may take some time.