DNS Records for Business Email

For mail to reach your Business Email mailboxes, your domain's DNS must point at our mail platform. When we provision your service we issue a record sheet with the exact values for your domain. This article explains what each record does and how to check it is working.

Use the record sheet, not this page, for the actual values. The shapes below are the same for everyone; two of the records contain values unique to your domain.

The records

1. A record for your mail host

Type: A     Name: mail     Value: (the IP on your record sheet)

This creates mail.yourdomain.com — the hostname you and your staff will type, and the one that appears in your mail client. It is your domain, not ours.

2. MX record

Type: MX    Name: @     Priority: 10     Value: mail.yourdomain.com

This is what tells the rest of the world where to deliver your mail. Note that it points at your own hostname, not at a vendor's. Our name does not appear.

⚠️ Remove any other MX records. If your old hosting MX records are left in place, some mail will continue to be delivered to your old mailbox and will appear to have vanished. This is the single most common cause of "we've migrated but some emails are missing".

3. SPF record

Type: TXT   Name: @     Value: v=spf1 a:mail.yourdomain.com -all

SPF states which servers may send mail using your domain. -all means "nothing else may" — the strict setting, and the right one once you have moved fully.

⚠️ If you also send mail from somewhere else — a newsletter service, a CRM, your website's contact form — that sender must be added to this one record. You may only have one SPF record per domain. Two SPF records is a misconfiguration and will cause failures; combine them instead.

4. DKIM records

Your record sheet contains DKIM records unique to your domain. We sign every outgoing message with two algorithms, so there is more than one record to add. The values are long — copy them exactly, without adding line breaks.

DKIM is the reason your mail is trusted by Gmail and Outlook. It is not optional if you care about deliverability.

5. DMARC record

Your record sheet contains a DMARC record for your domain. It tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails SPF and DKIM checks, and where to send reports.

Checking it worked

DNS changes are not instant. Allow up to an hour, occasionally longer.

To check from your own machine:

dig MX yourdomain.com
dig TXT yourdomain.com
dig A mail.yourdomain.com

On Windows, nslookup -type=MX yourdomain.com.

You are looking for the MX to name mail.yourdomain.com and nothing else, and for exactly one SPF record.

If you use Cloudflare

Set the mail A record to DNS only — the grey cloud, not the orange one. Cloudflare's proxy does not carry mail traffic, and proxying that record will break both delivery and your ability to reach webmail.

Migrating from an existing mailbox

Changing MX records stops new mail arriving at your old mailbox; it does not move the mail already in it. If you need your existing mail brought across, ask us before you change the records. Migration is a service we perform by hand, not a self-service tool, so it needs scheduling.

Getting help

If mail is not arriving after an hour, open a ticket with your domain name and we will read the live records and tell you what is wrong. Please do not remove records at random in the meantime — it makes the problem harder to diagnose.