About PTR & MX Records in Digital Ocean

Question

I am going to deploy my next big project in DigitalOcean. Before going with DigitalOcean I just want to be clear on few things about PTR records.

I have read most of community answers related to PTR records. And, up to my knowledge (understanding as well), DigitalOcean configures PTR record based on **Droplets ** name.

I have this scenario for my next project:

I want to host my website in DigitalOcean Droplets (let’s say its IP is 77.77.77.77 with URL lets say (abc.co.uk)
I want to set mail server in URL mail.abc.com.au and this is not in DigitalOcean and its IP is (let’s say) 88.88.88.88 in different server.

My Confusion is:

Should I name my droplets as “abc.com.au” or “mail.abc.com.au”?

And how do I configure A, MX, PTR records for perfect configuration so that there is no any issue related to spam and transaction of system generated mail (as far as I know, most of mail exchange services in these days do match dns and rdns for mail transaction (correct me if I am wrong))

alexdo · Answer

Hello, @eramesh11

DigitalOcean will automatically create PTR records for your Droplets based on the names you give your Droplets in your DigitalOcean control panel.

The name of your Droplet must be a valid FQDN (Fully qualified domain name), so using example.com as the Droplet name will create a PTR record, but ubuntu-s-4vcpu-8gb-fra1-01 or my-droplet will not.

It is up to you if you will use abc.com.au or mail.abc.com.au as your hostname. Usually a subdomain can be handy so you can go with something like droplet.abc.com.au and etc. Keep in mind this is totally up to you.

You can set the MX record to any subdomain of your choice like mail.abc.com.au as long as this subdomain is pointed to your droplet’s IP address. You can also set the MX record to match the droplet’s hostname, this will work too.

As for improving your outgoing emails you can make sure you have a SPF (this is basically essential)record added and also you can use any website like:

https://www.mail-tester.com/

In order to test test the spammyness of your emails. The result will tell you what else you can do in order to improve the score of your emails.

Hope that this helps! Regards, Alex

Report this

About PTR & MX Records in Digital Ocean

I have this scenario for my next project:

My Confusion is:

Become a contributor for community

DigitalOcean Documentation

Resources for startups and AI-native businesses

The developer cloud

Start building today