DNA Record Entry Questions

Website, Application, Performance DNS & Network
1

I have several questions about Cloudflare DNS Records… no problems, just need some clarification

Thes are my current entries:

Type Name Value Status

A autodiscover points to site IP [orange]
A example.com points to site IP [orange]
A ftp points to FTP IP [ gray ]
A mail points to site IP [ gray ]
A webdisk points to site IP [orange]
A webmail points to site IP [orange]
A whm points to site IP [orange]
CNAME www alias of site IP [orange]
MX example.com mail handled by example.com
MX mail mail handled by mail.example.com

Question 1:
Are the autodiscover, webdisk, webmail, and/or whm entries required here?

Question 2:
The two MX types above have warnings about exposing my origin server’s IP address. I have seen it recommended that the ‘A mail’ entry should have a gray cloud.

If I set the ‘A mail’ entry to gray, then it gets the warning and the ‘mail MX’ warning disappears. The ‘MX example.com’ remains unchanged. Is that normal?

Question 3:
On my host CPanel, mail.example.com is CNAME type pointing to the site IP, so do I even need to specify ‘A mail’ and ‘MX mail’ in Cloudflare?

Question 4:
Should I enter values as IP addresses or as hostnames (xx.xx.xx.xx or example.com, ftp.example.com, etc.?

2
  1. autodiscover is used by mail clients to get email settings. I don’t know of any applications that use webdisk, webmail and whm so they are not required.
  2. Your MX records confuse me. I don’t know why you have two there. Unless they have different priorities.
  3. I am guessing that the A record is for browsing to view the webmail client.
  4. It depends on what records you have. A records should always be IPs, CNAMEs should be hostnames.
3

Thanks for the quick reply. The two MX record confused me also, hence the last two questions. They do have different priorities. I think the last one was entered originally from a previous hosting provider and then updated. I’ll try removing the A mail record and the MX mail record and see if email still works ok.

Your answer to question 4 makes sense, thinking about it now.

I guess I’ll also try deleting the webdisk, webmail, and whm records and see what happens.

Thanks again

4

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