Topic: Name of my e-mail server

[Helpme]

What should I tell my DNS to put for my records.

Eg. A record = mydomain.com
      MX record = mail.mydomain.com
      C name Record = www.mydomain.com


What about virtual domains?  They need to know specifically what to put in for DNS entries.

[Alex Wallace]

I use mail.mydomain.com as the mail server on the MX account

[Helpme]

Great.  Thanks a lot Alex.

Did you have to set up an A record for mail.mydomain.com as well as one for mydomain.com?

I think that is my problem.

[Alex Wallace]

Boy I whish we could email back to the forum! instead of having to come back here to reply....

I use register.com to manage my domain dns, I only had to register mydomain.com and create an MX account for mail.mydomain.com and also redirected the mail.mydomain.com and mail entries on the hosts section of the e-smith manager to point to the external IP of my server... I'm not an experto on this, but this is how I got it to work...

Hope that helps!

[Dan Brown]

Keep it simple--set the MX to point to mydomain.com.  If you set it to be mail.mydomain.com, you also need an A record (not a CNAME) for mail.mydomain.com.  There's no real reason not to do that, but there's also no need for it.

[Helpme]

Ok.  Alex and Dan, that makes complete sense.  I had the added problem because mail.mydomain.com was routing to our external webmail (from our ISP).  That added a lot of confusion.

Dan, do I need to set the hostname "mail" to my external IP address like Alex did?

[Dan Brown]

I left "mail" set to the internal IP.

[Helpme]

Ok.  Sounds good.  Thank you very much for your help, Dan and Alex!