Setup domain to host email only

blaszlo

blaszlo

Verified User
Joined
Jun 9, 2008
Messages
116
Hey guys,

Never done this before, so please bear with me. A client called and asked if I could host their email on our server. Basically they have their website and all of their DNS hosted elsewhere. Our server that I would be hosting their email on is setup as a shared IP. I had their current web provider create an MX record to point to the hostname of the server, but mail isn't flowing. I feel I am missing a step. Any help?

Should I have their current web host create an A record for mail.theirdomain.com (our server IP), then point the mx record to that A record?

Any tips are appreciated
 
Did you set up their domain on your server? That's the first step. The second step is setting up their email accounts on your server (they can do that).

Once you've done that, tell us the domain name, and the shared IP# you're using on your server, and we can check DNS to see if there are any other issues.

Jeff
 
Yes, I setup the account for them. The shared ip is 72.236.153.55 and the domain name is pedsalliance.org - the ns for their domain is pointing to tcbinc.com and the MX is pointing to our servers nameserver (same as the IP I just gave you). Thanks again guys!
 
As far as I can tell, the MX DNS record is currently pointing to: mail.tcbinc.net

A hostname lookup for mail.tcbinc.net points to this IP address: 64.124.116.40

This obviously means that the person managing the DNS records for the pedsalliance.org domain has not updated the MX record to point to your mail server, which is: 72.236.153.55
 
Should I have their current web host create an A record for mail.theirdomain.com (our server IP), then point the mx record to that A record?
Click to expand...

The answer to this is YES! You need to ask the current web hosting provider to create mail.pedsalliance.org and they must point it to 72.236.153.55 via a DNS A record.

Then they need to update the MX DNS record to point to: mail.pedsalliance.org

The mail will then start flowing towards your server. Make sure that the email accounts have been created on your side to avoid bounced messages.
 
This was an emergency that required an immediate fix, so I had to have their current host continue to host their email as I couldnt get it working properly. If someone could tell me exactly what is needed as far as DNS records go (Both on my server and at the current host) that would be helpful. The setup in my original post didnt work. Thanks
 
Oooops, didn't see the message above the last. I will test this on another domain name and let you guys know. Thanks for the fast responses!
 
The above-mentioned solutions should work. That's all there is to it...

1) Create the pedsalliance.org domain on your DirectAdmin hosting server.

2) Create the @pedsalliance.org email accounts on your DirectAdmin hosting server.

3) Ask the current hosting provider to update the DNS A record for the mail.pedsalliance.org hostname to point to the 72.236.153.55 IP address.

4) Ask the current hosting provider to update the DNS MX record for for the pedsalliance.org domain to point to the mail.pedsalliance.org hostname.

5) Done!
 
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