Some emails working, some blocked
I moved my domain from one free cloudflare plan/account to another and after doing so, some email was coming through (primarily automated emails like newsletters and advertisements) but personal emails from clients were not. I have gone back in and made sure all my DNS records are corrected to what they should be, but I'm pretty new to Cloudflare and not completely confident about it - and I'm just learning that support isn't really accessible (which explains why I haven't been able to reach sales in over a month).
Why would some emails come through but not others?
14 Replies
DNSSEC being improperly setup is a common cause of records partially resolving, and can easily be misconfigured after a move. If you're using external mail servers and verified all records got copied over fine, it's one of the few things that would come to mind. Can you share the domain name?
patrickhildreth.com
And thank you!
;; QUESTION SECTION: ;patrickhildreth.com. IN MX ;; ANSWER SECTION: patrickhildreth.com. 288 IN MX 0 _dc-mx.728888fc6df9.patrickhildreth.com.Your MX record is pointing at a proxied record in Cloudflare. Cloudflare can't proxy mail traffic with the normal proxy, so it assigns it a virtual hostname like that but it doesn't work with all mail servers. There used to be a warning in the dashboard for this, not sure if there is now, but eitherway you'll want to unproxy the hostname your
MX record points to (if it points to mail subdomain or something and you still want the normal http proxy on there, could make a new unproxied subdomain like mail-delivery and point to that).yeah, I'm not sure how to fix that?
Oh, no, wait, I think I get it now. I need to change the CNAME to the IP instead of the domain.
You can just point your MX record at
mail.patrickhildreth.comMore like this?
target is good but the name should just be
@ or patrickhildreth.com
Okay, I just updated it!
yea, like that
Thank you SO much!
I don't know how I had it working before transferring it between accounts and then just messed it all up again, but I appreciate your help SO SO much!
of course, yea the dns side looks fine now, depending on how you transferred the quick scan can mess stuff up, or importing only lets you import as proxied/unproxied full, so hard to do a perfect import/export.
Mail servers have dns cache and such, will take a bit for them to see the change, but this would stop the issue with some mail servers seeing the mx target hostname as invalid
Thank you, I appreciate all the help so much. I read AFTER I tried to transfer that there's a whole separate import/export process for it and I'll have to try that next time - but this way I did get to learn more about how exactly Cloudflare works, so it's not all bad. Just appreciate your help SO much! ❤️