MX Problem

Help!

I am having some difficulty emailing email addresses based on domains hosted on cpanel, but have MX records pointing to an external server.

It's really hard to get a wrap around the problem, so I'll try to explain it the very best I can:

Scenario:

I have set up a website called donthyde.com, brittany-snow.com and rachel-boston.com. They are hosted on our cPanel server. However, we use Firstclass for our email server so I modify in cpanel the MX record for all three domains to go to fc.hermon.net

Now, it seems as though this works! I am able to send emails to my donthyde.com address from external services such as yahoo and get them on my firstclass email server (fc.hermon.net). HOWEVER, if for example, a cPanel user such as krallyproductions.com (another hosted site) tries to email me at administrator@donthyde.com, it fails! There is no NDN.. the message simply disappears!

So to verify this is happening on the cpanel server, I did this:

ssh into the cpanel server as root, and issued the following commands:

echo test | mail coderoyal@hermon.net (sucessful message from cpanel to hermon.net)
echo test | mail administrator@donthyde.com (message never recieved!)

The dns record on cpanel is actually correct. If I do a dig on the cpanel server for the mx entry, it does show fc.hermon.net.

What on earth could be the problem? It seems to only happen from email accounts cPanel manages, and the only domains effected are cpanel hosted domains with mx entries pointing away.

NOW, I've had another problem as well, which I am willing to bet is related to the same issue as well.

I will describe the problem as best I can:

Currently, we are interested in moving our town's website, hermon.net over to cpanel. We are going to avoid hiring an expensive developer and move to XOOPS. Our first step was to set up a new account with the hermon.net domain.

Then, on specific computers, we modifed the hosts file to point www.hermon.net to the cpanel's IP address. This allows us to develop a page and make it work, then later tell the registrar to use the new cpanel dns servers.

Modified the MX record on the hermon.net record on cPanel to point to fc.hermon.net. Made an A record for fc.hermon.net to point to 66.186.176.15 (correct IP for our external email server).

Later found out that if we used another email account on our cPanel server, such as chloemoretz.com, krallyproductions.com, and tried to send an email to a valid hermon.net address, it would again FAIL! I had no means of testing it from external email services since the DNS records are on the old dns servers, and not on cpanel.. which we know works.

Now.. here's the only logical explanation I can come up with. Based on the current configuration, my cPanel server will not correctly direct mail from domains hosted on it with external mail servers, to the external mail server. It's like it just not reads the MX record.

Where can I start to troubleshoot this and resolve the issue?

 

Hey! Wow! Thanks! Yeah, I did try doing a search, but no luck. I looked for MX and thought I was the only one with the problem

But this answers my question and I appreciate it Dalem!