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soapergem
Asked: 2011-03-04 05:24:17 +0800 CST

How do I set up my MX records to properly forward mail to my Gmail account?

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So I have to confess that I'm not a network admin so my knowledge of DNS is very limited, and I think I've screwed something up.

I own a domain--let's call it mydomain.com. I had my hosting provider set it up so that [email protected] forwards to [email protected] (my Gmail account). This seemed to be working fine; when I would send an email to [email protected] I would receive it in my Gmail inbox, and when friends would send to that address I would likewise receive it. When we originally set that up (and when it was working), I don't believe we had any MX records for mydomain.com at all.

A little later I started using an email sending service. (Something along the lines of MailChimp, although it was not MailChimp.) Let's call it mysender.com. I noticed that anytime I would try to send to [email protected] using MySender, it wouldn't work. It would never go through. Using that service, sending to anybody else from [email protected] worked perfectly! But when I tried to send mail from [email protected] to [email protected] using that same service, it would never come through.

So I started doing a little digging trying to find out why that was, and one site I found suggested that I needed to set up MX records for the domain in the DNS. So I just did that yesterday, and now I'm afraid that I screwed things up, as no mail at all seems to be flowing through anymore. Now even when I send to [email protected] from Hotmail or something like that, it no longer shows up in my Gmail inbox.

These are the records I added. Can someone tell me what I did wrong, and what I need to do differently?

mydomain.com MX 3600 [10] mydomain.com
mydomain.com MX 3600 [20] smtp2.mysender.com
mydomain.com MX 3600 [30] inbound.mysender.com
domain-name-system mx-record mail-forwarding

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If mysender.com is only sending mail and not receiving it, it should not have any mx records on your domain. (Delete the 20 & 30 MX records). Additionally, mydomain.com referenced in your mx record MUST HAVE AN A Record, a cname record will cause problems with mail delivery. Finally, if the other users in your domain do not receive mail from mydomain.com, they must have forwards or aliases set up om mydomain.com.

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  2. You should only be publishing MX records for the MTA you want mail sent to. And in addition to the MX to hostname record you also need an address record for the host.

    You don't add MX records for hosts you send mail from.

    You should however publish SPF records - which include all the hosts/domains you send mail from

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  3. Have you considered setting up Google Apps for your domain?http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

    It'll guide you through the process and it might be a bit more solid than what you've got.

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  4. In any case, it seems like you need a final dot "." at the end of you MX records, whatever the previous advice may be:

    • mydomain.com MX 3600 [10] mydomain.com.
    • mydomain.com MX 3600 [20] smtp2.mysender.com.
    • mydomain.com MX 3600 [30] inbound.mysender.com.
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