Domain setup and DNS configuration and a little email

Question

I'm trying to move a customers domain to my webhost and setup some email accounts. All very basic for most of you guys I guess. But I cant connect the dots in my head.

I have a reseller account at hosting company where I've made a account for the customer and added his domain and made a few email accounts.

I use another service to manage DNS for my domains. I have changed the nameservers with the domain registrar for the customers domain, pointing it to the nameservers of my DNS manager

In my DNS manager I have set ROOTIP for the customers domain to the IP of the reseller sub account (if that makes any sense)

I have done this before with other domains, but not with email accounts. My customer now says that after the nameserver change he hasn't recieved any mails. And now I feel im on thin ice.

So... what do I need to do to get his email working again? Im guessing I need to make some MX records with my dns manager. I've tried making one called mail.domainname.com with priority 10 - that is the ingoing and outgoing server according to the configuration info in the reseller sub account. Now im waiting for the DNS changes to take effect, its only been a few hours. But I want to make sure I'm doing it right :)

Answer 1

1. Confirm that there is an A record for "mail.domainname.com". (This works better than a CNAME.)
2. Since you may be making DNS changes set the TTL for the domain/record to be short, say 2 min, until you have it working correctly. Change it to between 1 - 7 days once it is stable.
3. Confirm that "mail.domainname.com" is what the mail provider wants to be used, it varies.
4. DNS changes s/b active within an hour but may be cached for much longer. You can test by using NSLookup (type ? once it's running for help w/ syntax). NSlookup lets you specify DNS servers to test, by testing your specific DNS servers you can confirm the records w/out waiting for DNS replication.
5. Telnet to your server: "telnet mail.domainname.com 25" to see if you get a response. You can substitute the IP for the FQDN if DNS is slow replicating. The server should answer, if not then something else is going on.

Answer 2

For mail server you need MX record change only MX recored to host mail server ;) all all will be OK :) If you make changes ot DNS meybe you need to waiting 24 hours .

Use google to chake MX record for your DOmain

Answer 3

Sounds like you are on the right track. I also created a CNAME for 'mail' which pointed to my mail server's name since 'mail' is just a subdomain, in this case, just the regular host so CNAME mail @. After the CNAME record was created, then I created the MX record.

Answer 4

Use MxToolBox to verify settings for the domain are correct (verify it with what you would expect it to be).

Answer 5

There is a small chance that the old MX record could be cached. This depends on the time to live set by the previous DNS records. If you did not have control over the DNS move, you have to hope that the setting was low (