Setting up third party mail on a hosting account

December 19, 2004 8:48 AM

MX-RECORD-Filter: About 8 months ago I signed up for two years of hosting, to get a price break. Since then, mail service has gotten messed up several times, to the point where I think these guys have a problem figuring out how to run it, and I'd like to be able to switch just my mail to another provider. I'd like to learn how to do this without learning in detail about the entire protocol stack. Any help? [MI]

Good pointers just fine, I don't expect a full tutorial here. This is especially frustrating to me, since I'm at a point now where it's critical to my livelihood that my email work. So, as an aside, once I know how to do it, any RELIABLE email service provider pointers would be welcome, too.

posted by lodurr to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Who hosts your DNS records? If you can edit them, just add MX records for your domain pointing to your providers' mail servers' hostnames. So if your domain is "example.com" and your e-mail provider has configured servers at mail.provider.net and mail-backup.provider.net to handle mail for your domain, you'd need these records:

example.com MX 10 mail.provider.net.
example.com MX 20 mail-backup.provider.net.

Don't forget the extra dot at the end of the hostnames, and don't try to use IP addresses or CNAME aliases - they must be the real canonical hostnames of those servers.
posted by nicwolff at 9:15 AM on December 19, 2004

I use fastmail.fm for my email and am satisfied. I got it originally because I wanted IMAP. It's not 5 9s of uptime, occasionally (less than every month) they do some service for 10 or 30 minutes. But this isn't the same as a web server and email isn't lost so it's not too big of a deal. I put my web site on godaddy but pointed my mx records at fastmail.
posted by Wood at 12:43 PM on December 19, 2004

What nicwolff said -- but bear in mind that some (mostly older) hosts don't understand MX records and will try to deliver mail to the host pointed to by the A record. So if you're reading mail with a POP or IMAP client, you may wish to configure it to pull down mail from both the content provider's server and the mail provider's server, to ensure that the odd bit of mail delivered to the old server is still accessible.
posted by bac at 3:08 PM on December 19, 2004

bac: I don't think that's still a serious problem these days, is it?
posted by fvw at 10:37 PM on December 19, 2004

I saw it as recently as a year or so ago. It's not at all common, certainly.
posted by bac at 12:41 AM on December 20, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks for the feedback. If godaddy lets me edit my mx-records, I'm not sure how or where. They'd certainly be happy to sell me email hosting, but I'm not sure I'd want it from them.

That said, one of "my" hosting providers does seem to have a way to edit an mx-record; does it make sense that they could do that? (Unfortunately, it's not the problematical provider, but another one.)
posted by lodurr at 8:56 AM on December 20, 2004