Configuring email forwarding to gmail with cloudflare and nic.ar

Ok recently i moved my nic.ar domain (rosciano.com.ar) into digitalocean. Old server had email server, cpanel, etc so when i moved to my lemp server i got http working perfectly but no email. I read about setting up email server but it looked like resource-consuming and way too many problems (security issues, spam, etc, etc) So I thought forwarding everything to gmail. I found 2 pretty neat tutorials http://www.andreagrandi.it/2014/08/31/getting-started-with-digital-ocean-vps-configuring-dns-and-postfix-for-email-forwarding/ and http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-bsd-postfix-forward-email-to-another-account/ in this post: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-do-i-set-up-email-forwarding-to-gmail-account

That helped me configuring postfix to forward emails, but i needed help with cloudflare and nic.ar, as nic doesn’t allow you to configure anything but ip-dns pair.

So here we go

Step 1) configure nic.ar domain go to nic.ar, login and choose the domain you want to use with cloudflare (for example domain.com.ar), then hit “delegar” on dns delegation delete anything you had and enter this 2

edna.ns.cloudflare.com
tim.ns.cloudflare.com

hit save, the update will happen in less than a day (yes, sucks, sorry)

Step 2) go to cloduflare, login (or register) and start step by step tutorial to add a new site (remember to wait for the delegation to happens. if no, you can still do this step and after the delegation you can go to cloduflare and hit the “re-check dns” button) After configuring a new site you’ll have several options to configure, in this example digitalocean IP of the required server is 55.55.55.55. the config we need for mail are:

Type   Name            Value               TTL     Status
A      domain.com.ar   55.55.55.55         auto    cloud-on or off
CNAME  mail            example.com.ar      auto    coud-off*
MX     domain.com.ar   mail.domain.com.ar  auto

*cloud-off is important, otherwise mails will be redirected to cloudflare servers

Step 3) go to your 55.55.55.55 digital ocean server and follow this tutorial from “configuring postfix” step: http://www.andreagrandi.it/2014/08/31/getting-started-with-digital-ocean-vps-configuring-dns-and-postfix-for-email-forwarding/

and that’s it. after that I send an email to somethig@domain.com.ar an it arrived perfect to my gmail account

Troubleshooting:

• I had problems understanding what should i put on cloudflare, so i putted the config here so it will be easier for you guys
• Mail still wasn’t arriving so i started to look at internet and this article saved me https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/postfix-mail-forwarding-socket-error-how-to-fix-mx-records I did dig +short MX domain.com.ar found everything was ok then i did dig +short A mail.domain.com.ar and found out cloudflare ip were appearing, that was because i had “cloud-on” on CNAME email, i disabled that and it worked

I hope it helps. Didn’t think this worth an article so i writting here for my fellow argentinian dudes that might need help