If after creating an MX record for your SMTP server in cPanel and your server is still unable to receive an email, it may be that the appropriate resource record sets or if your domain name registrar does not point to the name servers in your cPanel Zone Editor, so clients cannot connect to your SMTP server.
But it is also important to know that it sometimes might take 72 hours for changes to MX records to go into effect.
If it’s been less than 3 days since you set up your email with cPanel, wait to see if your new MX records work before troubleshooting.
If you check your records before they’ve had time to change, you may see your old records.
If you are using Cloudflare, do not proxy mail-related DNS records to Cloudflare.
If you have an MX record of “mail.domain.com”, then the A record for “mail.domain.com” must have a “grey-cloud” icon next to the DNS A record.
Best practices for MX records on Cloudflare
Follow these guidelines to ensure successful delivery of your mail traffic:
- “Grey-cloud” your mail-related DNS records so mail traffic isn’t proxied through Cloudflare.
- Use separate IP addresses for mail traffic and HTTP/HTTPS traffic. Cloudflare recommends using non-contiguous IPs from different IP ranges.
- Since mail traffic cannot be proxied through Cloudflare by default, you will expose your origin web server’s IP address. Information on your origin IP address would allow attackers to bypass Cloudflare security features and attack your web server directly.
- Don’t configure MX records for a root domain that is proxied through Cloudflare.
- Many hosting companies specify the root domain name in the content of the MX record. When using Cloudflare’s DNS, specify a subdomain such as “mail.example.com” in the content of the MX record and create a separate A record in Cloudflare for “mail.example.com” to point to the IP address of your mail server.
1. Review values that you specified in cPanel Zone Editor Record Set to ensure that you have created the appropriate resource record sets for your SMTP server. At a minimum, the hosted zone must contain a mail exchanger (MX) record for your SMTP server.
2. If you are using a domain name registrar other than Web Hosting Magic, verify that your domain name registrar is referencing the name servers in your cPanel Zone Editor. To do this, query an Internet-based whois utility such as the InterNIC Whois Search web page at http://www.internic.net/whois.html to do the following:
- Find the registrar for your domain name. Enter your domain name in the query field, select the Domain option, and then choose Submit. The query results should list the domain name registrar as well as the authoritative name servers for the domain name.
- Note: If the query results return a list of name servers other than the name servers associated with your cPanel hosted zone, DNS queries for your SMTP server will not be sent to our DNS systems, and you must contact your domain name registrar to update the list of name servers associated with your domain name.
- Find contact information for your domain registrar. Enter the name of the registrar in the query field, select the Registrar option, and then choose Submit. Use this information to contact your domain registrar and request that they update the list of name servers for your domain name to reference the name servers in cPanel Zone Editor for your domain.
- Verify that the DNS service you are switching from does not delete any resource record sets for your domain before the TTL on the registrar's name servers expires. This can take 48 hours or more, and our DNS services will not respond to DNS queries for a domain name until the TTL period for the domain name server records has elapsed.
A common MX record error that can affect the delivery of your email is the entry in the Name, Host, or Alias column.
Some DNS providers require that you prepend ‘@’ to an MX record set name or simply create an MX record set with the name ‘@’ when creating an MX record set for a root domain.
cPanel MX record set names should not be prepended with ‘@’ or any other character.
If you want to create an MX record set for a root domain in cPanel, leave the recordset name blank and provide appropriate values for the remaining fields of the cPanel MX record set.
If the MX record has been configured correctly and your SMTP server is still unable to receive emails, contact our technical support team for further investigation.
Or visit https://mxtoolbox.com which will list MX records for a domain in priority order.
The MX lookup is done directly against the domain's authoritative name server, so changes to MX Records should show up instantly.
You can click Diagnostics, which will connect to the mail server, verify reverse DNS records, perform a simple Open Relay check and measure response time performance.
You may also check each MX record (IP Address) against 105 DNS based blacklists. (Commonly called RBLs, DNSBLs)
