Mail server MX records etc

intellix

intellix

intellix

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Joined
7 Dec 2007
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302
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Derbyshire, Tibshelf
I'm not quite sure how to setup a mail server account... so far this is what I have a know:

I've bought and have a domain name: mydomain.org
I've bought and am using a dedicated server at Rapidswitch. The domain name bought from 1and1.co.uk is using Rapidswitch nameservers and inside their control Panel I have these settings:

A MY_SERVER_IPADDRESS
A www MY_SERVER_IPADDRESS

Inside Plesk 8 I have made an email address... [email protected] and then inside an email client I point the server as mydomain.org and try to login using [email protected] and the password I specified in Plesk... but it doesn't seem to work...

I haven't got a clue but... now I have my own dedicated server with a mail server running... what am I missing? :/

Thanks
 
Wherever you regged your domain name, you will need to update the nameserver records of the domain to whatever nameserver you are using.

Then, at the nameserver, you need a custom DNS record.

The custom DNS record will hold A records, as shown in your post, to show the IP address where the website will be served from.

You may then need to add a custom MX record to the DNS record to show the IP address where your custom mailserver resides.

I think ... although it's a bit hazy .... :o

Rgds
 
Found the problem :) It wasn't inside rcpthosts on the dediserver... added it and did a restart of the service... and I needed to add the mail.mydomain.org to the rapidswitch control panel :P
 
You need to create an MX record for the domain mydomain.org which points to the IP addres (or FQDN) at which the SMTP server responsible for mydomain.org is listening. So in summary, simply goto your ISP's control panel and create a MX record for your domain, and point it to the IP address of your server. Obviously make sure your SMTP server is listening at this IP address, and is setup to receive mail for that domain :)

What happens is that the mail client (if setup to send directly) will lookup the name server responsible for mydomain.org. It will then get the MX records for that domain (could be more than 1). It will order the MX records by their priority (ascending 10,20 and so on) and either use the IP address for that MX record, or lookup the A record if the MX record points to another FQDN. Once it has a IP address the client will then open a connection to the destination IP address and attempt to send the mail to the destination server. The destination server will only accept the mail if it has been setup to do so.

Cheers :)
 
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