Question

How should MX records look like for personal mail server

Hey,

I have a droplet on digital ocean hosting my own web server and now I’m trying to add a mail service with some combination of dovecot and postfix. I’m running into two issues:

  1. I am confused how to setup my MX DNS records. I tried to follow this guide, but I didn’t quite understand: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-postfix-e-mail-server-with-dovecot At the moment, I have the following. URL:: example.com MX: 2 records: mail.example.com mail handled by example.com example.com mail handled by mail.example.com Pretty sure this is wrong, but what should it be? Just the second one?

  2. Online test services report Reverse DNS is not a valid Hostname As far as I can tell, I have done everything right in order to have Reverse DNS lookup. My hostname and /etc/hosts are set to example.com and my droplet is named example.com The output of the host command:


% host example.com                                    
example.com has address IPV4ADDR
example.com has IPv6 address IPV6ADDR
example.com mail is handled by 50 mail.example.com.

% host IPV4ADDR
reverse_ip_address_here_.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer example.com.

Cheers,

Nick

Show comments

Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
January 26, 2021
Accepted Answer

Hi there,

What I could suggest is the following:

After that give it a couple of hours for the DNS cache to clear over the Globe and it should be ok.

As a side note, from the host command output that you’ve shared, I was able to check your domain name and the setup looks correct at the moment I believe.

Regards, Bobby

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Become a contributor for community

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

DigitalOcean Documentation

Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.

Resources for startups and SMBs

The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.

Get our newsletter

Stay up to date by signing up for DigitalOcean’s Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

New accounts only. By submitting your email you agree to our Privacy Policy

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Get started for free

Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*

*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.