MX record for transactional email - dns

I am interested in purchasing a domain, say mydomain.net
My application, whose url I want to be mydomain.net, would send transactional email for authenticating new users. For this purpose I decided to choose Sendinblue.
I want the sender of my transactional emails be noreply#mydomain.net,
thus I will add a new domain at sendinblue and call it mydomain.net. Then I will add a new sender at Sendinblue and call it noreply#mydomain.net
Am I expected to add a MX record at my hosting provider (and also name registrar) to set the mail delivery destination towards Sendinblue?

The MX records are used to receive mails only. Since you will be sending from Sendinblue and you will not receive answers to noreply#mydomain.net you do not need to create MX record for this.

Related

Why does Mailgun requires much information for domain verification?

I switched to use Mailgun from Sendgrid for email sending, we have several domains which would like to send email via Mailgun, to verify a domain, it requires for lot of DNS configuration like TXT, CNAME, MX... while with Sendgrid, it just asks me for 3 CNAME.
I'm not sure why Mailgun requires to configure much DNS information like that, does it take any advantages over SendGrid with just CNAME, if not, I think they should investigate and apply the Sendgrid way.
To clarify the use of each type of record for such mail service, For sending an email all you need to do is verify that you own the domain from which you are sending the email, they way these companies verifies the domain is by checking the DNS entry for either a CNAME or TXT record. Ideally post this verification you should be able to send email from either of the service.
The requirement of adding the additional records in the DNS zone are for use cases like -
TXT records - DKIM and SPF records, Adding these records ensures that your emails doesn't go to spam as the other email service providers verify if its a valid email from a valid sender using DKIM and SPF records. So you need to add the DKIM and SPF records.
CNAME record - Now a days everyone wants to track the email activities done by the users on the email sent to them. Activities like email opens, link clicks etc. These can be done by the email service providers but the urls of the links are converted to the email providers domain urls for tracking. If we want to have our own domain name for all links in the email including the tracking links, thats where a CNAME record for a subdomain is mapped to email providers domain and than that subdomain is used for all links.
MX record - This is required in case you want to receive emails via the email provider of your choice. If you are already using some other email provider for receiving the emails on your domain, you don't need to set up this.

Mailgun: wildcard subdomain "from-address" for SaaS

I've a small SaaS where each client gets a subdomain (stackexchange.my-saas.com)
I've a mailgun account where my main domain is setup and I've created a wildcard SPF record in my DNS and if I add additional domains to my mailgun account with a subdomain, they all verifies correctly.
My question is, do I need to add every new clients subdomain as a new domain in mailgun when I have the wildcard SPF record set or can i "legally" just create a from-address for each new client so the header of the emails will be from: Stack Exchange On My SaaS<noreply#stackexchange.my-saas.com>
Sending:
For sending, there is no need. As you point out, you can have the SPF records set so your email can be sent From: whatever subdomain. Note however that Mailgun will add a Sender: header with your Mailgun registered address if your specified From: address has a different domain.
From: Stack Exchange On My SaaS <noreply#stackexchange.my-saas.com>
Sender: noreply=stackexchange.my-saas.com#my-saas.com
Receiving:
For receiving emails, it's a different story. This is a Mailgun limitation and has been answered in this other question.
Basically, Mailgun uses the same MX servers for everybody, so when they get an email they need to look up to which customer the email belongs to, much like any regular multi-host mail server.
(UPDATE) They allow to register wildcard subdomains, combined with a wildcard MX, it might just work for every subdomain. Note however that because of how DNS works, there is no standard way to define BOTH a wildcard MX and a wildcard CNAME in the same domain. CloudFlare is currently supporting this but it will fail for most other DNS providers.
Alternatively, for receiving emails in your SaaS, you have to register each of your subdomains with Mailgun independently (possible through their API). Note that this also implies verifying the domains adding TXT records for each one on your DNS.
Let's start with understanding how email works. Receiver of the email checks for the dns records of sending domain for example your primary domain is yourdomain.com and email is sent from yourdomain.com will work since you have record created under this already when your email is sent from saas.yourdomain.com then DNS record for saas.yourdomain.com should exist or else it will fail to deliver to inbox. Mailgun asks to verify to make sure it is delivered to inbox and receiver makes sure by checking DNS that it is coming from authentic person by looking up at the DNS.
So the answer is as long as your sending domain is same then you will not create it but if your sending domain is different then you will have to create
Hope this answers your question.

Retrieve email server information form an email address

Given an email address, like "user#example.com", I'm trying to ascertain information about the email server they use, information like:
Domain
Port
Uses TLS
Currently, I can split the email address into two parts (for instance user and example.com), then do a MX lookup on the domain in order to attempt to ascertain the mail domain used:
dns.resolveMx(hostname, callback)
However, several hosts seem to use other servers than those (for instance, JustHost encourages all their domains from example.com to justXX.justhost.com in order to provide them with TLS) and attaining those is proving to be tricky.
The port is okay, as long as they use a default port, else as far as I can see it's impossible and TLS is easy to work out as long as I have both the domain and the port in order to contact the server.
Since all these methods seem unreliable at the best of times, are there better methods of ascertaining this information? This is in relation to making a mail client, which attempts to logon to the mail server to retrieve emails, and using the SMTP protocol in order to send emails from that server.
The only information that you can rely on is what is available in DNS. This is all of the info that is needed to send mail for a given address.
If you want to receive emails then it's an entirely different story. You didn't mention which mail server you need. The server that gets the incoming email? The server that lets user send email? The server that lets users download their emails? I'm assuming that you want the server that you can send email for that domain to - what is available as MX in DNS.
You didn't mention why you need that info but if you want it so you could send emails for those domains then you can sonsider using a transactional email service like or Mailgun, Mandrill or Amazon SES because it will handle all of those details for you. But you didn't say what is the purpose of getting that info so I don't know if that will help you, I'm adding it just in case.

Google MX and Zoho MX records for a single domain

I have been using Google mail application. I have created one email address in Google Mail.
I need to add some more email address and Google is very expensive to create emails. So I am planing to use Zoho for others emails. For example, I created info#example.com in Google application and I want to created santosh#example.com in zoho.
Is it possible.
The first thing you might thought about to setup two MX record (one from Zoho and another one from Google Apps) with different priority could work, but it won't work like that. Single mail server MX can be set as default. You can set two different MX record but that would work as fail-over, it can't split your delivery.
Yes it is possible, the technology called Dual Delivery OR Split Delivery. When emails are addressed to email addresses that are not found in one mail server it will send its delivery to another mail server and even can split them.
For example
domain.com has default mx record set to Zoho. User abc#domain.com is set under google apps & user xyz#domain.com under Zoho. Now if someone send mail to abc#domain.com which is configured under google apps, so the first request transferred to Zoho but zoho cannot found that email within organization so it will push the request to Google apps and will deliver the mail in its inbox.
Google Apps also offer dual delivery but unfortunately its available for Google Apps for Work account only. Zoho is offering it for all type of accounts so you still have chance to get it done via zoho.
Solution
Set up your domain MX record to Zoho
Configure delivery as per guideline mentioned here
https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/adminconsole/email-routing.html
If you would like to keep google apps account as primary then setup instructions can be found here https://support.google.com/a/answer/96855?hl=en

Using MX Records to Forward Email to Another Domain

I have a domain hosted at Dreamhost -- foobar.com. It has Google Apps associated with it: the 50 free email accounts which are no longer available for a new domain. I just got another domain -- foobar.edu. I want foobar.edu to become my main domain, but I still want to use the free Google Apps associated with foobar.com to handle incoming mail.
My question: Can I adjust the MX records of foobar.edu so that incoming messages to anyone#foobar.edu will be redirected to anyone#foobar.com and then be handled by my Google Apps?
I can adjust the DNS for both foobar domains, but I don't think that I can ask Google's foobar.com account to also handle foobar.edu emails directly.
if you need just catch email on domain and forward to you other mailbox, you can use http://improvmx.com/ just by adding MX records to your domain
No. You can use MX records to direct mail destined for anyone#foobar.edu to any mail server you want, but when the mail is presented to the chosen mail server, it will still be destined to anyone#foobar.edu.
In other words, email forwarding can't be controlled using MX records.
It's the receiving mail server's job to re-send an email to a "forwarding" address.
As Celada saw, with DNS you can't.
You can do that with Google Apps Default Routing: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368153?hl=en
As suggested in this question, you'd need to point your MX records to a service that supports mail redirection
It can be only done with advanced DNS routing and it is not freely available, It would be more easier if ou have had Google Apps for business. There is only one company who can allow you to manage Email DNS routing and that is ZOHO. The implementation would be a bit complicated, but possible.
Register account for foobar.edu in Zoho, Verify domain then change MX record. Manage it's Email Routing Options and Manage redirection to different accounts.
Check some of Screenshots i have tested on and it worked. Also check zoho dns email routing guide.
https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/adminconsole/email-routing.html
I hope this will help you!

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