IMAP and POP

[artdoer4]

I have used Cloudflare before but it’s been a little while, like 2 years. In the past we had to make sure that in the MX record for the email forwarder we set up in Bluehost had to be correct. We had to make sure the first field had to read MX your domain and the next field had to read mail.yourdomain.com. Then, when all was populated, there was a CNAME IMAP your domain and a CNAME POP your domain and CNAME WWW. your domain and lastly a MX your domain and on the same line only a little to the right, there was mail.your domain. If in the second field in the MX record wasn’t mail.your domain than we had to change it. My question is, do we still change the MX record to read mail.your domain for the email forwarder?Preformatted text

[epic.network]

Welcome back to Cloudflare.

The answer is maybe.

The MX record needs to point at a hostname that is either an A record, AAAA record, or both, but never a CNAME. That hostname should resolve to the IP address of your email server. Whether or not that hostname is mail.example.com is mostly your call, assuming that you are not using a third-party service, which would require you point to their hostnames.

When using a hostname in the same domain, make sure that you set it to DNS Only so that email will work. Proxied hostnames can only pass web traffic.

[DarkDeviL]

@artdoer4

My question is, do we still change the MX record to read mail.your domain for the email forwarder?

Specific for Bluehost, I would go as far as to find the “box” ID/hostname that your services for the given domain is connected to, such as for example box0000.bluehost.com.

When you have found that exact “box” host, you’ll point the MX like:

Type: MX
Name: @
Mail server: box0000.bluehost.com.
TTL: Preferably set it to something like 12-24 hours, as MX records/mail related likely do not change that often.
Priority: 0

NOTE: That box0000 is a fictive example, and won’t work.

This kind of set up, using your hosting provider’s “real” host names, would be much better than pointing the MX records for your own example.com domain to mail.example.com, and then pointing mail.example.com to random IP addresses that may work today, but isn’t guaranteed to be working tomorrow.