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How To Configure Your DirectAdmin Server To Use a Remote Mailserver For Your Domain?

Category: DirectAdmin
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The following instructions have you logging in as admin initially just in case you need to enable the DSN Control option for the user. If the user’s account doesn’t have the MX Records menu in DirectAdmin, you will need to enable this option. Learn, How To Configure Your DirectAdmin Server To Use a Remote Mailserver For Your Domain?

1. First, to login into DirectAdmin control panel visit, 

https://your-domain.com:2222 or https://IP-address:2222 or https://server-hostname:2222.

login-into-directadmin

2. Navigate to Email Manager → MX Records.

navigate to mx manager email management directadmin

3.  Un-check the Local Mail Server option Use this server to handle my e-mails. If not, change the MX records and uncheck this option → Click on Save.

Use this server to handle my e-mails. If not, change the MX records and uncheck this option.

4. Remove the “mail” MX record. Select the record → Click on Delete.

remove existing mx records directadmin

5. Using ADD RECORD option, add a new MX record that resolves to the IP of the remote mailserver.

add new remote mail server mx record

6. Congratulations! You have successfully configured remote mail exchanger (MX) record for DirectAdmin.

How To Configure Your DirectAdmin Server To Use a Remote Mailserver For Your Domain
Make sure that you do not simply change the IP of the mail subdomain! For some reason, DirectAdmin sees this record and still sends mail locally, even when the domain no longer exists in /etc/virtual/domains! Thus, you may want to create a different subdomain, such as ‘mx’ or use the domain name if it resolves to the remote mailserver (this may occur if you have an account that exists on both the local and the remote server, such as is common with migrations where one domain under the same account hasn’t had its DNS updated to resolve to the new server yet).

Errors that are common when sending mail between a domain that exists on the local mailserver and on the remote mailserver, but are being routed incorrectly are as follows,

R=lookuphost defer (-1): lowest numbered MX record points to local host

OR

all relevant MX records point to non-existent hosts

The error message below indicates that the mail is being routed locally despite having deselected the local mailserver option.

R=lookuphost defer (-1): lowest numbered MX record points to local host

This has occurred in instances where the ‘mail’ subdomain wasn’t removed and had had its mail A record changed to point to the remote host instead.

all relevant MX records point to non-existent hosts

Conclusion

Now that we’ve gone over how to configure remote mail server for DirectAdmin user account. Enabling and configuring these settings affects all the email addresses related to the domain so we recommend configuring this setting carefully.

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