VPS with WHM - Email Setup

Question

this is my first time (well the past 3 days) hosting my own accounts on a VPS. I have this with heartinternet and also had a resellers account which I'm now trying to transfer everything across to the VPS. I have now figured out how to get the domain working so happy with that. Now I seem to be having trouble with the emails as I cant login, and I don't fully understand how this works.

I have had a look at the DNS settings and have the following A record:

mail pointing to my servers ip.

I also have 2 MX records, blank and '*' which both point to mail.mydomain.co.uk.

My questions are as follows, what are A records, MX records and also do I need to set anything up in WHM.

Any help is much appreciated.

regards

Answer 1

You need an MX record that points domain.com. -> mail.domain.com.

This will enable email for user@domain.com to go to the server specified by mail.domain.com.

You then need an A record for mail.domain.com point this to your server's IP address.

Also, there is a section about mail exchangers. WHM tries to be smart and auto-set how email should be delivered. Generally you do not need to do this, but if you are using email not on your server (e.g. gmail), you may have to set this to remote mail exchanger.

This is a bit dated but I have a video tutorial here: http://www.rackaid.com/flash/whm11-services-voice/whm-services-22-dnszones.html

Answer 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DNS_record_types
A = Name -> IP
MX = List of mailservers
PTR = IP -> Name (often needed for mail servers to not be marked as spam on the recipient side)

If you can't login to your server you should check the logs, the accounts and their passwords.

You should also post your error messages when stating questions related to them. Telling us which steps you take to reproduce the error is quite helpful too (mail client, web login, ...).