Remote Mail Exchanger; Office365

[moolah]

Hi,
First off, thanks in advance for anyone who's able to assist.

After recently setting up my website using AWS/Centos and Cloudflare for handling my DNS, I've realized that some incoming email from 3rd parties isn't delivering to my email addresses (which I had registered through Godaddy's Office365 reseller packages). On the Cpanel Email Routing option, I've opted for Remote Mail Exchanger, which I read somewhere should be the option selected if some 3rd party mail server like Microsoft's is to handle my email delivery. I previously had selected Automatically Detect Configuration (recommended), but noticed that a large number of emails were not going into my Outlook (on my desktop/phone), and were viewable only from within Cpanel's Horde or Roundcube. To be clear, my web server is meant to generate some outgoing emails. For instance, when someone registers on my website, they're meant to receive a welcome email. I currently have 2 MX records - one for the email delivery via Office365's mail server, and one being my web server (referred to by hostname in its MX record). I noticed the priority of the web server MX record and that of the Office365 mail server were both set to 0, so I've just adjusted the priority of the Office365 mail server to 1, as I'm assuming my web server should take priority in delivering/receiving email.

Thanks once again, and let me know if more details are needed to elaborate the issue.

Darren

 

[ZenHostingTravis]

Hi @moolah,

I think you should just have one MX record and it should be set to Remote Mail Exchanger, as you've discovered.

You should use an SMTP plugin in Wordpress (if that is your CMS) to relay email via SMTP rather than the PHP mail() function as it's more reliable.

 

[cPanelLauren]

Hello,

So an MX record determines where mail sent TO your domain is delivered. If you're sending some mail from the server but you have a 3rd party service to handle the rest of mail sending as well as inbound mail, your MX record should definitely be pointing to the remote server.

I've realized that some incoming email from 3rd parties isn't delivering to my email addresses

So when this happens, in your case because mail is received remotely, troubleshooting receiving mail needs to be done on the remote server. In a lot of cases they have separate spam detection software which will fail or quarantine mail. But in this instance we wouldn't be able to tell you what happened to the email, since it's all being received to the remote server.

 

[moolah]

Thanks for the response Travis. I learned from paid support that I should only have 1 MX record, and after deleting my MX record pointing to my Cpanel hostname, and setting the email routing to Remote Mail Exchanger, the email deliverability problem appeared to be fixed. Regarding relaying via SMTP, do Wordpress plugins that facilitate auto-generated emails (for instance, for website membership welcome emails or form submission responses) use the PHP mail function generally?

Cheers,
Darren

Hi @moolah,

I think you should just have one MX record and it should be set to Remote Mail Exchanger, as you've discovered.

You should use an SMTP plugin in Wordpress (if that is your CMS) to relay email via SMTP rather than the PHP mail() function as it's more reliable.

 

[moolah]

Thanks Lauren,
Is it standard practice for these forum posts to be throttled for a day or so to encourage Cpanel users to resort to the faster paid support requests? My initial post wasn't approved until after more than a day, after I had already ended up requesting paid support.

Hello,

So an MX record determines where mail sent TO your domain is delivered. If you're sending some mail from the server but you have a 3rd party service to handle the rest of mail sending as well as inbound mail, your MX record should definitely be pointing to the remote server.


So when this happens, in your case because mail is received remotely, troubleshooting receiving mail needs to be done on the remote server. In a lot of cases they have separate spam detection software which will fail or quarantine mail. But in this instance we wouldn't be able to tell you what happened to the email, since it's all being received to the remote server.

 

[cPanelLauren]

Thanks Lauren,
Is it standard practice for these forum posts to be throttled for a day or so to encourage Cpanel users to resort to the faster paid support requests? My initial post wasn't approved until after more than a day, after I had already ended up requesting paid support.

I'm unsure how you would come to that assumption namely because cPanel offers free support. The only instance in which you would pay would be if you chose to purchase priority support, which is entirely up to you to do. We do require approval for new users to post and while I do see that you waited some time to have your post approved it was not a day. Furthermore, once you've been posting for some time you will not have to have your posts moderated as this is just a measure to weed out spam and has absolutely nothing to do with the availability of support. I will also note that should you feel that you need immediate support the forums is not the best place for this. Anytime you believe you need immediate support you should open a ticket with cPanel support which, again does not require payment.

 

[ZenHostingTravis]

Thanks for the response Travis. I learned from paid support that I should only have 1 MX record, and after deleting my MX record pointing to my Cpanel hostname, and setting the email routing to Remote Mail Exchanger, the email deliverability problem appeared to be fixed. Regarding relaying via SMTP, do Wordpress plugins that facilitate auto-generated emails (for instance, for website membership welcome emails or form submission responses) use the PHP mail function generally?

Cheers,
Darren

Hi Darren,

Thanks for the update.

Glad to hear the email deliverability problem has been resolved.

Like @cPanelLauren said, you shouldn't need to pay unless you requested priority support.

In response to your question, Wordpress uses PHP mail () by default.

You should install an SMTP plugin if you want to use SMTP instead and I highly encourage you to.