Getting E-mail With Custom DNS

The purpose of this document is to provide a step-by-step guide for determining if you need any MX records, and how to set them up if you do.

These instructions make use of yourdomain.com extensively. This will always be replaced with your actual domain name when you are working with your account. Additionally, unless specifically told otherwise, do not enter any quotes ("") when filling out forms.

The following instructions apply to the Standard Interface only. If you are using the Expert Interface, you may wish to view the examples for Expert users.

Do you need an MX record?

Before we go any further, if you have not yet read the KB article E-mail, Mail Exchangers, and DNS, then you should do so now, paying particular attention to the first two sections.

The first step in determining if you need any MX records is deciding how you will receive your e-mail. To receive e-mail, you need a mail server. Either you will be running the mail server yourself, or someone will run it for you. If someone is running a mail server for you, you will need to find out from them the hostname of that mail server.

With this in mind, we'll look at the three most common cases our customers fall into.

Case 1: Hosting Your Own E-mail

If you're running your own mail server, make a note of the hostname you've created that points to it - usually this will be yourdomain.com itself, or perhaps mail.yourdomain.com. However, if you've used our instructions for redirecting web requests to a non-standard port, you may have something like www2.yourdomain.com as the host pointing to your server.

Case 2: MailHop Forward, Relay or Backup MX

If you are using one of our MailHop® services there are specific requirements for MX records. Please see the MailHop How-To for details on these MX records.

Note that MailHop Relay is most often combined with hosting your own mail server since its major reason to exist is ISPs blocking port 25.

Similarly, MailHop BackupMX is often combined with hosting your own server but can also be used with a third party e-mail hosting company.

Case 3: Somebody Else Hosting Your Mail

If a third party (not DynDNS.com or yourself) is hosting/providing your mail services you will need to contact them to determine what MX records you need to create in your Custom DNS zone.

One item of particular note here, some third party hosting companies persist in instructing customers to create MX records that point to aliases. If your e-mail hosting company has provided you with MX record data and our system refuses to accept this and reports:

(smtp.yourdomain.com.) Mail eXchanger (MX) records must point to hostnames that exist, and are host (A) records, not aliases (CNAME).

then the problem is most likely that your mail hosting company has provided you with an alias. You will need to do a query on the alias to determine the hostname this points to and enter this in place of the alias.

Example:

	$ host smtp.example.com
smtp.example.com is an alias for inbound-smtp.super-elite-isp.com
inbound-smtp.super-elite-isp.com has address 10.11.12.13

In the above example you would need to enter inbound-smtp.super-elite-isp.com as the Mail Exchanger value instead of smtp.example.com

Creating the MX records

At this point you should have a list of one or MX records you need to create. If you have two or more MX records you need to create then you also need to know the relative preference for each. If you are unsure of what preferences you should be using, refer back to the KB article E-mail, Mail Exchangers, and DNS.

Using the Standard Interface

  1. Log into your account and navigate to the Custom DNS zone for which you wish to configure mail (Account tab - My Services column - My Zones/Domains link - Custom DNS).
  2. On the "DNS for yourdomain.tld" page, click the Edit MX List button. (If you do not see this button, you are using the Expert interface. Click the Preferences button, then the Disable Expert Interface button to return to the standard, wizard-style interface.)
  3. Enter the mail servers for your domain in the Mail Exchangers field, one per line, in order from highest priority to lowest. For example, if you have a mail server called mail.domain.com which is your primary mail server, and backup.domain.com is the secondary backup server, you would enter:
    mail.domain.com
backup.domain.com
    in the Mail Exchangers field.
  4. Click Save Mail Exchangers to create the new MX records.

Using the Expert Interface

  1. Log into your account and navigate to the Custom DNS zone for which you wish to configure mail (Account tab - My Services column - My Zones/Domains link - Custom DNS).
  2. Under the Add New Record section, enter a Host, TTL, and Data value. In most cases, leave the Host field blank to create records for the second-level domain itself. The Data field takes a numerical preference value followed by the destination mail server, such as 5 mx1.mailhop.org or 20 mx2.mailhop.org.
  3. Change the Type dropdown to MX.
  4. Click the Add Record button to create the record.

A typical MX record may look like this:

Host
TTL
Type
Data
domain.com.
43200
MX
10 mail.domain.com

For more information on the meaning of these values, please view the KB Article on MX Records