I have a client that wants me to host e-mail forwarding only.
His site is on wix.com and I have attempted to have wix point the mx records to my virtualmin server.
I have gone through the process of setting up a new virtual server for his site, with e-mail only items selected, and have set up accounts that are set up to forward like normal. But something is not working right. I believe it has to do with how I have wix set up to point the mx records to my server.
Could you help me with how I need to set up the DNS on the 3 party server (in this case wix.com)
and how I need to set up my virtualmin server?
The more detailed /specific the better. I am generally new to this server admin stuff, and this is the first time I have ever set up my own DNS server. I have looked at other threads that referenced this but they did so in such a general manner that I didn’t help.
Essentially the only thing I know right now about it not working is that when I send a test e-mail it doesn’t work.
I am not necessarily trying to trouble shoot quite yet, as much as I am just making sure I set it up correctly. I am hoping someone could give me the steps in how they would set up a e-mail server for a domain that is hosted with another dns.
How would they set up the 3rd party DNS?
How would they set up the server to accept e-mails?
Well, there’s a variety of ways to do that, but from what you described in your first post, what you did sounds correct.
Setting up email accounts designed to forward on your server, and having the MX records point to your server, is certainly a way to do all that.
So it sounds like you were close – once you’re ready to troubleshoot, just let us know what you’re seeing in the email error logs, and we can work from there.
I re-read your initial post, and in there, you described that you think the issue might be with the MX records. For that, you’d want to verify that all your nameservers for that domain are correct (pointing to your third party DNS provider), and then verify that there is an ‘MX’ record, and that it’s pointing to your Virtualmin server.
Also, if you let us know the domain name, we can test the DNS to make sure it looks correct. You can also review the DNS settings yourself by going to intodns.com, and having it generate a DNS report for you.
However, the email logs can really help you get to the bottom of what isn’t working.
The key there is that you’d want to send yourself a test email, and then look at what new entries show up at the end of the email logs, immediately after you send this test email.
If you see an email come in – that’s a good start, then we can track where it’s going from there.
If it doesn’t come in at all, that could mean that there is a firewall or DNS issue.
[These are all the MX records that I found. If there are some non common MX records at your nameservers you should see them below. ]
Almost Everything else has a check next to it. that has an blue circle with an i, as well as
Number of MX records OK. Looks like you only have one MX record at your nameservers. You should be careful about what you are doing since you have a single point of failure that can lead to mail being lost if the server is down for a long time.
Okay, for that MX record, you’d want to add an ‘A’ record for “mail.domain.org” at your DNS provider.
The intodns.com report should be able to identify an IP address associated with your MX record – and once you add that ‘A’ record, it should then be able to do that.