Emails via SMTP not arriving

[Pat3333]

What is the name of the domain?

Home - Mr. Colette

What is the issue you’re encountering

The SMTP server is taking too much time to respond.

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

I’ve contacted the hosting company who confirmed that the mail script is running.

What are the steps to reproduce the issue?

Hi,

I’m facing an issue on my WordPress website since moving to Cloudflare with emails from SMTP not arriving anymore. I have set up SPF, MX and Dmarc to the best of my knowledge.
Hoster is OVH. All the DNS stuff is a bit over my head, so I might just have messed something up.
Testing an email on my domain using Email Checker - Verify Email Address Online gives me the “The SMTP server is taking too much time to respond.” error.

Thanks for looking over this

Screenshot of the error

[fritex]

Thank you for asking and sharing screenshot.

Taking a look at the above shared screenshot, kindly make sure to unproxy and switch from to (DNS-only) your email related DNS records:

• CNAME pop3
• CNAME smtp
• CNAME imap
• CNAME autoconfig
• CNAME autodiscover
• CNAME mail
• CNAME ovhmo4260876-selector1
• CNAME ovhmo4260876-selector2

Also, the others such as:

• CNAME FTP

Proxied DNS records work with HTTP(S) traffic and not email (yet).

Helpful article how to propperly setup email related DNS records while using Cloudflare for your Website:

Set up email records · Cloudflare DNS docs

Upon changes, give it some minutes to apply them.
Exit your email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, etc.
Re-test and test with online tools such as below just incase:

Newsletters spam test by mail-tester.com

[Pat3333]

Dear Fritex,

Thank you so much for your swift and knowledgeable reply.
I made the changes yesterday and wanted to wait till this morning.
Unfortunately, emails are still not coming through although on my server I was able to see a small spike for some reason:

My Spam score from mail-tester.com sits at 9.9/10, so that should be ok.

I’m still getting the “The SMTP server is taking too much time to respond.” error from https://email-checker.net/

[Pat3333]

Forgot to add a screenshot of my DNS settings now:

[Pat3333]

GOOD NEWS!
Suddenly emails just started coming through now. Maybe it was indeed just a matter of waiting 24-48 hours.
Thanks for the excellent support!