From time to time I observe the following email setups, from web hosting providers mostly:
$ host -t mx example.com example.com mail is handled by 5 mail.example.com. $ host mail.example.com mail.example.com is an alias for www.example.com. www.example.com has address 192.0.2.2
In other words this is a single server that provides web and mail services, The devil is in the details though: mail.example.com is an alias for http://www.example.com. This is a mistake as when something is declared as a CNAME, it cannot have other resource records bound with it. I copy from DNS for Rocket Scientists:
CNAME RRs cannot have any other RRs with the same name, for example, a TXT – well that was true until DNSSEC came along and in this case RRSIG, NSEC and certain KEY RRs can now occupy the same name.
So the above setup is wrong. The correct setup would be the following:
$ host -t mx example.com example.com mail is handled by 5 mail.example.com. $ host mail.example.com mail.example.com has address 192.0.2.2 $ host www.example.com www.example.com is an alias for mail.example.com. mail.example.com has address 192.0.2.2
That is if you want to use a CNAME at all. Personally I am using A RRs instead of CNAMEs whenever possible. But why cannot a CNAME carry any other information? I copy from RFC1034 (section 3.6.2):
A CNAME RR identifies its owner name as an alias, and specifies the corresponding canonical name in the RDATA section of the RR. If a CNAME RR is present at a node, no other data should be present; this ensures that the data for a canonical name and its aliases cannot be different. This rule also insures that a cached CNAME can be used without checking with an authoritative server for other RR types.
So please people, correct your defaults. Your clients will benefit from that.
Managing organized complexity 
Generally, I also see this incorect use of CNAMEs by many people, and I prefer using A records instead of CNAMEs.
The only recent example where I have prefered CNAMEs over A records is with dual-stack systems and AAAAs.
I have put A and AAAA RRs for one system, and then use CNAMEs for other roles on the same system, which made them instantly dual-stack, without the need to duplicate the IPv6 address to all of them.
Once (2008/02) I complained to a large mail hub about their use of CNAMEs in MX records and the hazard it caused to our users. This is what I got back:
Some people tend to think that they are above RFCs. They are wrong. Today I checked and the CNAME is not there. Where’s the advanced technical solution now?
I recently saw a problem where NS records pointing to CNAME wouldn’t allow proper resolving, at least with Bind9…
I’ve seen a *whole* domain as a CNAME to ghs.google.com…