Hosted Exchange DNS Question

[mikelato]

I recently decided to use a hosted exchange email account from microsoft for a couple of different reasons, mainly for organization and mobile sync.

Microsoft gives me the following instructions to allow me to use their mail server for my email but I have a few questions.

1.Sign in to your domain registrar’s website, and then select the domain that you’re verifying.
2.In the DNS management area for your account, choose the option to add a TXT record for your domain.
3.In the TXT box for the domain, type the following: @
4.In the Fully qualified domain name (FQDN) or Points to box, type the following: v=verifydomain MS=msXXXXXXXX
5.Where it asks for TTL information, type the following: 1 Hour
6.Save your changes, and then sign out of your domain registrar’s website. Wait at least 15 minutes for this change to take effect.
7.Return to Office 365 and click the Verify button below.

So I did this by creating the following entry in my DNS management in DA...

@ TXT "v=verifydomain MS=msXXXXXXXX"

My question is this...Am I supposed to remove the current TXT entry that DA put in which is...

domain.com. TXT "v=spf1 a mx ip4:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ~all"

Secondly, am I still allowed to have local email if I have both entries or am I forced to use microsoft for all of my email accounts on this domain if I go this route?

Thanks!

Mike

 

[nobaloney]

Microsoft has once again given incomplete and potentially misleading information.

The @ symbol is a DNS shortcut for the root domain name for the zone. In other words, for zone example.com, the symbol would be understood by DNS as example.com. (note the trailing dot).

Microsoft will detect this txt entry and know it should handle email for the domain.

But there's still a lot missing. Unless you're forwarding email for your address to Microsoft by a change in exim.conf, you'll need to also change your MX record and/or the target of your MX record, as otherwise incoming email will never reach your Microsoft account; it will still be pointed to your account on the DirectAdmin server.

There's no reason you couldn't have a separate TXT record for SPF, but if you're sending outgoing email from Microsoft's servers the default SPF record is probably not ideal as it will tell senders that mail from Microsoft should not be as trusted as email from your own server.

There's no generic way to accept only some email addresses for your domain in one server, and others in another but you can do it:

You can custome your exim.conf file (or perhaps pay someone to do it for you) to have exim route certain email addresses to Microsoft instead of attempting local delivery; if you're going to do that then all incoming email should still point to your DirectAdmin servers (all the default DNS except the one TXT record Microsoft is telling you to add.

Or you can ask Microsoft if there's a way that they can route all email for all other addresses back to your exim box, in which case you'll need the MX settings for Microsoft (see above).

Jeff

 

[mikelato]

Thank you for your response. I actually got as far as adding the MX records and I can now send and receive emails through the exchange server. So I guess I did everything right.

Now my issue is that I need to be able to keep certain emails on my server. I really don't want to pay microsoft for each email when the only reason I'm using hosted exchange for this is that I would like the activesync and a calendar for my personal email.

I would like to keep one email on my server [email protected] and then set up some forwarders to go to the admin account (facebook@, twitter@, etc..) and some forwarders to go to my personal email (billing@ support@ contact@ etc).

Would this all be possible by editing the exim.conf like you mentioned? If so, do you know of any instructions you could reference? Or, would you want to do it for me and PM me a quote for this?

Thanks!
Mike

 

[nobaloney]

Mike, please contact me by email, hopefully with more detail, and I'll get back to you as quickly as possible.

Thanks.

Jeff