Unable to get email working correctly

Getting Started
#1

Hi there

Firstly apologies for posting here. I’ve tried for a day to resolve the issue myself. Subquently I contacted my shared server website hoster, however they’ve just pointed me here.

If Cloudfare is disabled/paused all appears to be working, both my email client (thunderbird) and the contact form on the website. If I enable Cloudfare I am no longer able to check mail through thunderbird and the contact form times out. I have played around with the orange and grey clouds, however had had no luck where both the CDN (when testing through gtmextrix) and email work togther as designed. Please see a screenshot of the current settings.

Can anyone offer any suggestions on how to get this setup correctly?

cloudfare dns
cloudfare dns2147×1813 288 KB

Regards

#2

Your mail CNAME points to a hostname that’s set to :orange:.

I suggest that you Delete that CNAME, and add it as an “A” record instead with the IP address of your server. And that “A” record should set to :grey:, just as you did for your CNAME.

Your MX record for example.co.uk points to example.com.uk. It should point to the ‘mail’ subdomain.

#3

Thanks for the swift reply. Just confirm before i make the changes/edit, the CNAME you’re referring to is the mail one rather than the www?

When you say my MX record points to example.com.uk, i don’t see that. Can you clarify what my MX record needs to be? In CPANEL my MX record was automatically set to Name: example.co.uk. 14400 MX Priority: 0 Destination: example.co.uk

Thanks again in advance

#4

I have made the changes in the way I understood what your wrote. Unfortunately still not working. Is this the setup you meant?

cloudfare dns updated
cloudfare dns updated1677×1697 245 KB
Cpanel DNS
Cpanel DNS3009×1573 243 KB

#5

What error are you seeing? I’m able to connect to that mail server.

Screen Shot 2020-10-25 at 12.00.15 PM
Screen Shot 2020-10-25 at 12.00.15 PM1070×566 59 KB

#6

thunderbird is failing to connect to the server (even after removing the account and re-adding) plus WP Mail SMTP in wordpress is giving an error “Could not connect to the SMTP host” after updating the SMTP host to the updated sub-domain mail.example.co.uk

Are you saying all my DNS settings are correct? If so ill look at seeing if i can sort the application issues

Thanks again

#7

It could be timing out. It takes about 15 seconds for the SMTP server to respond.

#8

So thunderbird now working, on the fourth attempt or so it went through. WP SMTP would not work with SSL/465 but does seem to work with no encryption

Any thoughts on the reason for the timeout/delay when there was no problem with the original settings and no cloudfare?