MailHop Forward

This guide will help you set up the MailHop® Forward service.

What is MailHop Forward?

MailHop Forward accepts mail for your domain (user@yourdomain.com) and redelivers it to mailboxes hosted elsewhere (user@gmail.com, user@yahoo.com, user@yourispmailbox.com, etc.). By using MailHop Forward, you can receive mail for your domain without hosting your own mail server, without being locked into any particular mail hosting provider, and without changing your daily e-mail habits.

How do I set it up?

Please complete the following steps to get started with the MailHop Forward service. This guide assumes that you are using our domain registration and Custom DNS services, though they are not required to use MailHop Forward.

1. Create MailHop Forward

The first step is to create the MailHop Forward service for your domain, e.g. mydomain.com. You have two choices: MailHop Forward Lite and MailHop Forward Business. The Lite service allows up to five aliases (addresses) with one recipient each; Business allows unlimited aliases with up to ten recipients each. After purchase, please allow up to fifteen minutes for the service to activate.

Once the service has been created, visit its configuration page to begin adding aliases, modifying the anti-spam settings and enabling optional DNSBLs for your service. Once you have added your addresses to the service, please proceed to the next step.

2. Configure your MX records

To allow MailHop Forward to receive email for your domain, you will need to add mx1.mailhop.org and mx2.mailhop.org as the primary and secondary MX records for your domain. If you are using Custom DNS, you may simply click the Set for MailHop button on your DNS configuration page. If you are using third-party DNS or the Expert interface, your MX records should be:

Host TTL Type Data
example.com 43200 MX 10 mx1.mailhop.org
example.com 43200 MX 20 mx2.mailhop.org

You may include additional mail servers in the MX records for your domain, but mx1.mailhop.org must be the primary and mx2.mailhop.org must be secondary or lower. Please note: If mx1.mailhop.org is not the highest priority mail server, it will detect the actual primary server and resend the message without processing it (i.e. direct delivery). If mx2.mailhop.org is used as the primary, it will reject mail to sender.

Troubleshooting

Mail delivery problems can often be difficult to troubleshoot, as there are many points along the way where a message could be delayed, rejected, or even silently dropped without the sender ever knowing a problem occurred. Please check the following entries to see if they describe your problem; if not, you can contact our support team for further help.

When contacting Support, please send the full headers of any delayed or rejected emails (including timestamps and Received: entries) where available, and describe the timeframe of the problem to the nearest hour with timezone. Please make sure you contact Support using an email address outside of the problem domain to make sure we can contact you!

Mail is delayed for hours, then arrives all at once.

This is a symptom of greylisting, where a mail server will temporarily reject mail (4xx error) to deter spammers. If your mail provider is greylisting MailHop Forward, you should contact them to let them know that the mail destined for your addresses is legitimate, and contact Support to let us know of the problem. (Make sure to include the full headers of delayed messages so we can properly diagnose the issue.)

My mail is being rejected with a 550 User Unknown error.

Unless MailHop Forward explicitly receives a 5xx Permanent Failure error from the destination server, we will not reject email with this form of error. There are many potential causes of this problem, but one of the most common is blacklisting. Many mail providers use blacklists or automated spam controls that block senders after too many "bad" messages. You will need to contact your provider and ask them to allow your mail to be delivered, then contact Support to let us know of the problem. (Make sure to include the full headers of any rejected mail so we can properly diagnose the problem.)

I receive a lot of mail. What are the queue size and message size limits?

MailHop Forward does not limit the total volume of individual messages it can store or redeliver. MailHop Forward has a per-message size limit of 10MB; individual messages larger than 10MB will be returned to sender with a useful error message.

I'm getting a lot of spam. Can I block more of it with MailHop Forward?

MailHop Forward includes a variety of anti-spam options. By utilizing these features, you can drastically reduce the amount of spam delivered to your server via MailHop Forward. Simply lowering the Tag Limit and Discard Limit of your service by a few points each can result in a significant drop in spam.

I want to use an anti-spam service like Postini as well as Forward.

Unfortunately, you cannot use MailHop Forward and a third-party anti-spam service simultaneously. You can learn more about this here.

Some of my aliases automatically have spam scanning enabled. Why?

Some mail hosting providers are more sensitive to mail delivery than others. In an effort to ensure smooth, consistent mail delivery to certain addresses, some aliases will have spam scanning and virus elimination automatically enabled when they are created. (You can learn more about our anti-spam features here.)

We currently force spam filtering for the following domains: aol.com, att.net, bigpond.net.au, comcast.net, insightbb.com, mac.com, mchsi.com, videotron.ca, worldnet.att.net, optonline.net, verizon.net, hotmail.com