MX records can be thought of along the lines of a physical address, for this example, you can imagine that an MX record is the address of your home. Now imagine that you had 2 address, one address for your home and one address for a shop that you own (your website). You decide that rather than receiving mail that is destined for your shop you instead decide to get all of your mail delivered to your house instead. So…..you need to tell the source that delivers your mail that anything with both your shop address and your home address needs to all go to the same place you have chosen, this is a rough approximation of the function of the MX record.
A lot of website owners prefer to use an email system such as G Suite (Google Business account) rather than a mailbox that is tied to their server. This means if their web server goes offline, they can access their emails. People often get worried by editing DNS records but it is super easy so we have listed 5 easy steps to take below that will aid you when making changes to your MX records: –
1) Accessing your MX records – You can initially access your MX records via the Zone Editor within cPanel ( find the editor within the ‘Domain’). You will find a table containing a list of domain(s) that are assigned to this cPanel account – scroll until you find the domain to which you wish to assign the MX record.
2) Adding MX records – Alongside the domain select the ‘+ MX record‘ option, you will be asked to enter a ‘priority and a ‘destination’. In regards to the priority setting the value assigned to this is an integer, the lower the integer the higher the priority of the record. ‘0’ is assigned to the MX record which is to be the highest priority. The destination entry is the email server that will be assigned to that particular MX record. Below is a table with the MX records for G Suite: –
| Priority | Destination |
| 1 | ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM |
| 5 | ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM |
| 5 | ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM |
| 10 | ALT3.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM |
| 10 | ALT4.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM |
3) Delete your current MX record – Deleting a current MX record is straightforward, head back to the list of domain(s) within the zone editor and select the ‘manage’ option to the right-hand side of the domain you wish to delete the MX record from. You will navigate to a table containing the zone records for this domain. The MX record is usually around second in this list (do take care to make sure you select the right record to delete!). The delete option is in the right-hand margin of the table, simply select ‘delete‘ to delete the record you have chosen.
4) Authenticate Google to allow emails to be sent using the new MX record – Once you have added the MX record you will be required to authenticate it so that Google can send emails using the new MX record. To do this go back to cPanel and scroll down to the ‘email‘ area and select ‘authentication‘. Once onto the authentication page you will come across a section labelled ‘SPF‘, scroll down the table until you find ‘Include List’. Select the ‘add‘ button then add the following: –
‘_spf.google.com’
5) Check that your email routing is set to remote – This is usually automatically set for you but is worth double-checking. To check this go back to cPanel, back to the ’email’ section and select ’email routing’. This page will display several options, the top option is a toggle to allow an automatic configuration. The configuration should look like this ‘Automatically Detect Configuration: Remote’ if this is stated then everything is working correctly. If you see ‘Automatically Detect Configuration: Local’ there is a problem with the configuration.
The steps above should aide you in setting up MX records relatively easily, should you have any difficulties or would like more information around this topic please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions (open a ticket) with our hosting department – we will try to get back to you as soon as we can
