Email with my domain

How to set up my email

[rknuppel]

Hello all.

I just recently transferred my domain name to Register.com and I'm now having problems setting up and managing email accounts. Can someone walk me through what needs to be done on the server side and on the domain host (mx records) side.

I run my own IIS server.
I have an SMTP server running.
Register.com is my domain host and I use there DNS.
I have A records set up to point to my IP, then use host headers on my IIS machine to handle my subdomains.

I would like to be able to send email and receive email using [e-mail] or [e-mail] etc.

Thanks for the help,
Ryan

[txbakers]

In your SMTP server, you need to set up the domain so it knows where the DNS records are.

Then, in your zone file you would create another A record that points yourdomain.com to mail.yourdomain.com. (with the period at the end)

Then, finally, you set the MX record to 10 mail.yourdomain.com. (with the 10 and the period). This should route mail to your server.

You can't directly point the MX record to an IP address, since mail comes through DNS. So you need to create a DNS entry for the mail server's IP, then point the domains to that DNS entry.

The 10 is the priority assigned, since you can have several mail servers for one domain. The lower the number the higher the priority. Why? I don't know, it's a computer thing.

[rknuppel]

Will this route all messages sent to ***@domainname.com or do I have to set up individual mailboxes? For instance, if I want [e-mail] do I have to set up an individual mailbox somewhere? Or should it automatically get routed to my mail server using the settings you described above?

Thanks,
Ryan

[txbakers]

all mail will be routed to xxx@domain, but you will need to set up the individual mailboxes. I never fully took the time to understand the MS SMTP server, so I downloaded some other mail servers which were much easier to understand and set up.

Mercur mail server is a nice one as is ArGoSoft (I think that's the name - do a search in TuCows for mail servers)