MX records help move email to the right place by specifying which server handles the email. If you have an account with us here, but have a domain hosted somewhere else that does not offer email services, you may want to host your email with us here on your InMotion account. This is most certainly possible but does take working with both your InMotion account and your third party DNS service. Follow the instructions below to learn how to change MX records to point to InMotion email servers from your third party DNS service.
Setting up the InMotion Server
First, you want to set the InMotion server side to be ready to receive the emails once you make the changes with your third party DNS. You will need to be sure you have two tasks completed below.
- Adding the domain as addon or parked domain. Even though you will not be using the domain on our server to display the website, it will need to be added to your account as an addon or a parked domain to be able to create email accounts and receive email. It is recommended to set up the domain as a parked domain, as addon domain slots are more limited.
- Creating an email address on your server. Next, you will need to create email addresses on your InMotion server. Without the proper email addresses, the emails will simply come to the server and get rejected, or bounces, as they will have no email box to be delivered to.
Setting up with your third party DNS
After setting up the email domain and email address on the InMotion account, you need to visit your third party DNS service and log into your account there. You will be editing some of the records to have them point to your InMotion account server.
- Create a mail A record.You will first need to check to see if you have a mail record. If you do, you simply need to edit the current one. If not, you will need to create a new one. The mail record will have several parts.
A Record Details
| Record Name |
The name will simply be mail |
| TTL |
TTL (Time To Live) is the number of seconds the record information is kept on record before refreshing. 14400 is standard, but you if your DNS service uses a different number, use that. |
| TYPE |
The Type of record. In this case it will be A |
| IP Address |
The IP address of your InMotion server. You can find this IP address from within your cPanel. |
- Edit your MX record. After creating or modifying the A record for the domain, you will want to edit the MX record to point to that A record. Like the A record, there are several parts to it. The table below explains how to set your MX record.
MX Record Details
| Record Name |
The name ofthe MX record will be example.com. (Be sure to replace ‘example.com’ with your actual domain name.) Also be sure to include the . at the end of the domain name as it is very important. |
| TTL |
TTL (Time To Live) is the number of seconds the record information is kept on record before refreshing. 14400 is standard, but you if your DNS service uses a different number, use that. |
| TYPE |
The Type of record. In this case it will be MX |
| Priority |
Useful if you have more than one MX record. 0 is the highest priority and means that record will be used first. |
| Servername |
This is the record that wil be used to send email. This should be set to mail.example.com. Note that ‘example.com’ should be changed to your actual domain name and the . at the end of the record is part of the record and must be present. |
Now that you have made all the changes necessary and saved the new DNS settings with your DNS provider, you will need to allow for propagation time. This is when the DNS servers around the world allow the current information to expire. This can usually take from 4-24 hours. Once that information expires, your new information will take over and you should then be able to receive email to and from your InMotion server.
For more information, check out our Email Knowledge Base.
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