How to solve emails problems after site is migrated to Digital Ocean

@JiteshShah

If I understand correctly, you’re wanting to use DigitalOcean to host your actual website, but use the e-mail services provided by GoDaddy and the shared hosting plan that your website was previously on, correct?

If so, when doing a lookup on the domain businesslabs.org (the domain you’ve noted above), I see a few issues right off.

• 1). It looks like you have two A entries, both of which point to businesslabs.org to the same IP. You need to remove one of those entries.

• 2). The lookup doesn’t report any valid MX entries, and without them, you’re not going to receive e-mail.

• 3). The lookup doesn’t report any valid CNAME entries, and these are used by your MX entries, and without them, e-mail won’t resolve to the noted mail.businesslabs.org.

So to get things in working order…

Let’s start fresh!

Whatever entries you have, whether A, MX, CNAME or other, delete them from within CloudFlare (not GoDaddy) and let’s start from square one by adding our A entries first.

Adding A Entries

NOTE: I’ll be using DROPLET_IP and GODADDY_IP as we move along. Simply replace DROPLET_IP with your DigitalOcean Droplet IP Address and for GODADDY_IP, you may need to get in touch with their support team. It all depends on whether the IP shows up in cPanel for you.

A       @       DROPLET_IP
A       www     DROPLET_IP
A       mail    GODADDY_IP

Most all DNS providers, including CloudFlare, accept @ as a reference to your domain, which is why I’ve used it in the above. This simplifies things quite a bit.

The www entry ensures that requests for both businesslabs.org and www.businesslabs.org will resolve equally.

The mail entry is what I was referencing above. Since MX entries do not resolve to IP’s, a name must be available, so we’re setting mail, which will reference mail.businesslabs.org from here on.

Adding MX Entries

Now we need to add an MX entry for mail.businesslabs.org

MX      0       mail.businesslabs.org.

Here we’re setting a Priority of 0 for mail.businesslabs.org which is standard since you’re not (to my knowledge) using multiple mail servers. This represents the highest priority.

If you have four input fields, you may need to use @ to reference your domain once again, in which case your MX entry would look like this:

MX      @       0       mail.businesslabs.org.

Adding Other Entries

At this point, we have proper A and MX records. You may have a CNAME setup for www – it’s not needed as we instead set www as an A entry (which is perfectly valid and actually more appropriate).

From here, if you need to add additional entries, simply add them as you did the above. When it comes to sub-domains, they should be setup as A entries. The only time you may need to use a CNAME entry is if GoDaddy requires it for mail. This is the default setup with cPanel, though I’m not really sure why as it simply complicates DNS resolution.

For example, if you’ve setup a A entry for your domain using:

A       @       DROPLET_IP

and a CNAME entry using:

CNAME   mail    businesslabs.org.

When mail is accessed, the routing looks something like this:

mail    ->  mail.businesslabs.org   ->  businesslabs.org

Whereas with with an A entry, the routing is cut down to:

mail    ->  IP