Simplest Way to Setup Email for Various Domains

Question

I'm beginning to use Mandrill to send out transactional emails from my various domains. Now what I'd like is a way to receive these emails simply w/out setting up a mail server on my linux boxes. I'm wondering if there is a service like this? I use Google Apps for one of my domains, but this is no longer available as a free service AND Google Apps is way overkill for what I want to accomplish (usually, I just want to have the email address of that domain forwarded to another email address - e.g. I have the domain ocddave.com and want to forward emails sent to [email protected] to an email address at davemackey.net).

Answer 1

Quite a few domain name registrars offer e-mail forwarding as a free feature.

Typically the interface for managing regular DNS records is used to create a custom record type indicating an email (or URL) forward. In the background that forces the domain registrar's mailservers as the MX servers for the domain, but since you don't want to run your own mailservers that shouldn't be a problem.

The better ones will require some form of validation from the destination mailbox before the mail forwarding is activated.

E-mail forwarding increases false positive ratio of the forwarded email being marked as spam by many webmail hosters and if you run your own email domain anti spam measures like grey listing won't work either.

Answer 2

As has been noted, your domain registrar likely can forward email for you. If you are sending email from your domain, you will want some basic email setup including an MX. Adding SPF, and DKIM signatures may increase your delivery success. You will want your MX to accept (and possibly forward) email sent to the sending address, as well as mail sent to postmaster of each sending domain (which you do want forwarded).

You may want to use a Reply-To: address to get responses directly to your address. Although, if you have set up forwarding, you do have that option as well.

If you already have setup an email server on one of your Linux servers, it can act as the MX for all your domains. You will need to update your configuration to include the additional domains. You have two options for aliasing addresses in this case (both can be active):

1. Per domain aliases (may be documented as virtual domains).
2. Global aliases (apply to all domains) which are ideal for addresses like postmaster.

All your outgoing email should go through one (or two) properly configured servers. This should have an appropriate PTR record to enable reverse DNS validation. It can also do DKIM signing on outgoing email. You can sign multiple domains using the same key, but you will want to sign for the sending domain, not the mail server's domain. SPF and DKIM will allow you to enable DMARC as well.