newbie needs help

[sturmdogg]

Hi guys,

I need some help here. I have this client who is running his own mail server, but he needs me to host his website. What do I need to do so that his emails go to his mail server while pointing the url to his webhosting account?

Thanks!

[KyleC]

there is an option in cpanel to 'Modify Mail Exchanger' but that requires a domain, so u would prob need to edit the dns zone in whm to make mail. point to his servers ip

and he would need to configure his server to accept mail from the domain you are hosting

[Buddha]

To edit the DNS zone in WHM you need to sumit a trouble ticket to have that function activated.

[openbox]

Once you setup the domain, you need to edit your DNS info and change the MX record to reflect your customer's mail server domain name. If your customer doesn't have a domain name for their server, then create an A record for their IP address and point your MX record at that domain.

[sturmdogg]

Once you setup the domain, you need to edit your DNS info and change the MX record to reflect your customer's mail server domain name. If your customer doesn't have a domain name for their server, then create an A record for their IP address and point your MX record at that domain.

His domain name is already active, and is using it to send/ receive email to his mail server. Does this mean I need to change his domain's A record so that it points to the account im hosting?

[openbox]

Nope, just create/edit an MX record to point at the domain of his mail server and the mail server should handle the rest.

[Dan]

Hello Sturmdogg, having gone through this with my companies website recently I can give you a few pointers on the procedure.

Create the domain on your server.
Upload all of their files.
Change the dns at the registrar to point to your server.

At this point you need to determine what the existing MX record and their gateway/servers IP is. You can do this a number of ways, doing a dig, looking at the existing DNS on their existing server, or (possibly) even by guessing as many times it's just mail.domain.com.

Once you've determined this you will need to edit the DNS zone for the domain on your server.

Go to DNS functions in your WHM and select Edit a DNS zone.
Select the domain from the list then select edit.

By default WHM creates an MX record of:
domain.com. 14400 IN MX 0 domain.com.

And it also creates a CNAME of:
mail 14400 IN CNAME domain.com.

Those are the two records that you are interested in. Note the 0 (zero) in the first, being the lowest number that makes this the MX for the domain of the highest priority (the first to handle email).

For the purpose of this post I will assume that their existing gateway/server is setup as mail.domain.com.

Change this record:
domain.com. 14400 IN MX 0 domain.com.

To be:
domain.com. 14400 IN MX 0 mail.domain.com.

Change this record:
mail 14400 IN CNAME domain.com.

To be:
mail 14400 IN A ###.###.###.###

Replacing the #'s with the IP assigned to their gateway/server.

What doing this will accomplish is:
Assigning an IP as mail.domain.com.
Assigning all email for domain.com to be sent to mail.domain.com.
All email for domain.com will then be sent directly to them.

There should not be any configuration changes that need to take place on their server. The rules of propagation will apply though. Meaning that these changes will take up to three days to go into effect and that it is possible that emails may be returned as undeliverable. When I have done it though I did not have any such problems as servers will hold mail and continue to try to resend.

Hope that helps!

[piku]

http://www.han.com/dns.html

[vizability]

I have followed Dan's instructions on a clients site that has their email hosted externally...

My problem is that the results from a form on their website aren't being emailed to any address on that domain - when I look at webmail on the client's account, all the emails are sitting there with nowhere to go.

If I change the recipient in the cgi script to my email address it comes through fine

so... any ideas to sort this out? Is it a DNS issue or is there some trick to setting up a default accounts or forwarders? Should I be able to email form results in this way?

many thanks
Stuart

[openbox]

It's a DNS issue. When your script sends the mail, it looks at DNS records and sees that you have a local entry. As currently configured, you won't be able to have mail sent to an external SMTP server from your local account.

[vizability]

...it looks at DNS records and sees that you have a local entry..

Thanks openbox - I take that to mean that the external mail server may not be properly identified..

I have adjusted the DNS settings as follows:
domain.com.au 14400 MX 10 mail.maildomain.com.au.
mail.maildomain.com.au. 14400 A 203.xxx.x.xxx

Are any other changes necessary? Am I correct in presuming that because this is local then changes should be immediately effective for testing?

Cheers

[openbox]

Unfortunately, mail originating from the server, will stay at the server. Mail incoming to the server will see the MX record and head to the other server.

[vizability]

waaat??
how do i send mail from the website then? must be a way...

[AndrewT]

waaat??
how do i send mail from the website then? must be a way...

Submit a trouble ticket and this is something that we can correct for you. Be sure to include the domain name.

[openbox]

Good luck. I haven't put too much effort/thought into it yet, but I haven't heard of it working yet. The question has been asked a couple of times before. One way would be to delete your DNS records and host your DNS somewhere else.

Edit: Oops, I stand corrected by Andrew