After (or before if you’re smart) you’ve tediously moved all your sites to Cpanel from an older Godaddy hosting account, you have to change several CNAME and MX records in the DNS settings of each domain in order to make email work correctly. I called Godaddy and talked to them about all this, after people complained of bounced emails, so hopefully it will save someone some time!
**In all honesty, setting up and paying for a google apps business account is better, but if you NEED to do it this way (like me, I have 10 emails for different domains), then this is how – warning, mail does not arrive immediately in your inbox but you can push it manually if you’re in a rush. **
These are the DNS Records that you actually NEED:
I use Cloudflare.com for my DNS hosting, because, they’re awesome.
First, one by one, I deleted anything that had “secureserver” in it (in DNS settings), the only CNAME records associated with email that you really need anymore is:
CNAME: MAIL @ (how you enter this will depend on your DNS host)
……..That’s it.
*Don’t delete anything that doesn’t imply it’s for mail – they will either be starting with webmail, mail, e, email etc and pointing to XXXXX.secureserver.XX (where x is something). Definitely remove anything that has secureserver in it – that is the old hosting plan’s mail servers.
Now, MX Records:
The only MX record you need is:
MX mail.[your domain name]
Cloudflare defaulted it to a priority of 10.
GMAIL TIME!
- In GMAIL, click the Gear icon at top right then > Settings > Accounts and Import.
- Add the email you want to use as a SEND AS and a CHECK MAIL AS email.
- Then use the settings below as instructed (SEND AS is where you need the Outgoing info and CHECK MAIL AS is the Incoming settings)
Username: Your email address
Password: Your email account’s password
Incoming Server: mail.[your domain name]
Incoming Ports: IMAP — 143 or POP — 110 ( Sadly you HAVE TO DO POP with Gmail…barf.. but yes.)
Outgoing Server: mail.[your domain name]
SMTP (Outgoing) Port: 25 (587 or 80 might also work.. I used 25 on TSL)
Notes:
- Mail on Godaddy’s shared hosting is absolutely, horribly, slow. It sits in a queue with everyone else’s emails who is on the same server.
- I tried again and again to use SSL settings with no luck, testing each email address from an outside email address (Yahoo email). I expect that Gmail will do a fine job of scanning the emails before they come through anyway so this probably isn’t a big deal? My impression at least.
- I despise anything email related.
- I spent a lot of time dealing with this hopefully so you won’t have to! I had a hard time finding a decent blog or doc with all this info together so.. I made one!