Does hostmaster email needs to be in same domain as defined in zone file?

Question

I am going through Bind9 to configure DNS server for my domains, but during this process I am confused about points one of them is, when we put email address in zone file do I need to put hostmaster email address with same domain name that I am using in zone configuration file?

For example I have created zone for "example.com". Do I then have to put xxx.example.com in forward zone file or can I put main email in all configurations?

$TTL    86400   
@   IN  SOA     ns1.example.com. myemail.gmail.com (
20081112001 ; Serial
28800   : Refresh (s)
3600    ; Retry (s)
604800  ; Expiration (s)
38400   ; Negative Cache TTL (s)
)
;
@   IN  NS  ns1
@   IN  A   127.0.0.1

anx · Accepted Answer

No, it does not need to be in the same domain.
However, it is very common to use hostmaster.example.com, either matching the domain part of the name server or the preferred domain of the organization/company (e.g. example.net, example.com & icann.org all use the same SOA rname).
The recommendation in RFC 2142 Section 7 conflicts with using something like a gmail address:

For simplicity and regularity, it is strongly recommended that the
well known mailbox name HOSTMASTER always be used <HOSTMASTER@domain>.

The most important question however, remains whether even when your DNS is broken your hosting providers have reliable means of contacting you.
Caveat: Just because you publish your preferred methods of contact in whois, SOA, Impressum, security.txt etc. does not mean they will be used that way.
I have received inquiries to hostmaster@domain.example without ever publishing such address in the SOA record of domain.example, which is a good argument in favor of unconditionally setting up hostmaster as an alias.

Does hostmaster email needs to be in same domain as defined in zone file?

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