Runbox offers its members a number of alternative domain names that are synonymous, and can all be used to receive email in your account. Some examples of these alternative domains are demo@runbox.com, demo@runbox.no and demo@runbox.eu (there are others).
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What parts make up an email address?
The part before the @ symbol is called the local-part, and the part after is the domain.
Domains ending with .com are perceived in different ways. For many people they represent global domains that are not tied to any particular country. For others they are associated with organisations in the United State of America. In contrast, it is quite clear that domains ending in .no are associated with Norway, and there are strict rules about who can register .no domains.
Does it make any difference which of the Runbox domains I use?
We sometimes get asked if using runbox.no has any benefits over using runbox.com in terms of how email is routed over the Internet. Frequently these questions are related to security and privacy where members want their email to be routed directly to our servers in Norway and not via another country.
In reality email (or any other Internet service) isn’t routed according to the type of domain used, but is routed according to where the servers are that need to communicate with each other. They are not routed according to any country the domain you are sending to or from might apparently belong to.
This means that regardless of the country or region a domain might appear to be registered with, or where the user of that address lives, email is routed according to which servers need to contact each other to get messages delivered.
If you want to know more, read on!
So what happens when you send an email?
All email services work in a similar way, but let’s describe here what happens when you send an email through the Runbox mail servers.
1. Your computer sends the email you want delivered from your computer or other device to our SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server.
2. Our SMTP server looks at the address for delivery and works out which mail server on the Internet handles email for that domain.
3. Our SMTP server contacts the recipient server directly and asks it if it will accept email for that email address. If the answer is yes, then the message is handed over and the recipient server is now responsible for delivering it.
4. The recipient server looks at the local-part of the address and delivers the message to the appropriate email account.
How do your servers know where to send an email?
For servers to communicate with each other they need to know each others IP (Internet Protocol) address. This is the Internet equivalent of your phone number. All domains belong to the Domain Name System (DNS), and information about the IP addresses of the servers that are associated with a domain are stored on other servers called DNS servers. DNS servers can be public so that anyone can use them, or private so that an organisation has their own cached copy of the domain information they need.
During Step 2 above, our servers look at our DNS cache to see if we already have the details for where to send email for a particular domain. For large email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo and AOL we deliver a lot of email, and therefore probably already have a record of the IP addresses for their mail servers. If we don’t have the details of the mail servers for a particular domain we have a service called a DNS resolver that contacts other DNS servers on the Internet to ask them for the details. How a resolver works is beyond the scope of this article, but Wikipedia has some useful information about the Domain Name System and how it works.
Some examples
For each fully qualified domain name there is an authoritative name server that contains IP address details about other servers that provide services for that domain (e.g. website and email). This information will include the mail server details if the domain is used for email. A receiving mail server is called a Mail Exchanger and the Mail Exchanger details on the name server are called MX (Mail eXchanger) records.
Below are the name server and MX records for 3 domains. Domains have more than one name server in case one of them has a temporary fault. The name servers contains details of which other servers provide services for that domain. Below we have shown just the MX entry for that particular domain.
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runbox.com
Name server: dns10.copyleft.no. IP address: 188.94.218.244
Name server: dns11.copyleft.no. IP address: 178.255.144.240
Name server: dns12.copyleft.no. IP address: 208.82.206.13
MX server: aibo.runbox.com 91.220.196.211
runbox.no
Name server: dns10.copyleft.no. IP address: 188.94.218.244
Name server: dns11.copyleft.no. IP address: 178.255.144.240
Name server: dns12.copyleft.no. IP address: 208.82.206.13
MX server: aibo.runbox.com 91.220.196.211
domainyouown.com
Name server: dns1.name-services.com. IP address: 98.124.192.1
Name server: dns2.name-services.com. IP address: 98.124.197.1
Name server: dns3.name-services.com. IP address: 98.124.193.1
Name server: dns4.name-services.com. IP address: 98.124.194.1
Name server: dns5.name-services.com. IP address: 98.124.196.1
MX server: aibo.runbox.com 91.220.196.211
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The examples above show that while the first two domains are different, they have the same name servers and same mail server for handling their email. This isn’t surprising given they both belong to Runbox. However, what it does clearly show is that there is no difference when it comes to routing email to those domains. All mail servers on the Internet will try to contact the machine known as aibo.runbox.com at IP address 91.220.196.211
The third domain (domainyouown.com) has different name servers that are responsible for holding details about this domain. However, when the MX record is looked up on those servers, it turns out it is also aibo.runbox.com. This means that Runbox also look after email for this domain.
You can find out this kind of information for any domain. A good website to use is http://www.intodns.com/
We also have more information about using the Runbox alternative domains, and information about how to set up your own personal domain for use with your Runbox account.