Question about hosting email on our own server with dyndns custom dns service

Hi i have a domain which registrar/webpage hosting/email hosting service were kept with a company. however, i now wish to host my own emails, but let the company continue hosting our company's webpage. please help as i am new to this.

what i did:
1) subscribe custom dns and sendlabs service with dyndns
2) get the company to point the name server of my domain to dyndns
3) on the dyndns website, point the mx records to dyndns as well.
4) download and installl dyndns updater client on my server
5) on the dyndns website, point www.example.com to the webhosting company but point example.com and mail.example.com to my server

please see below picture:

picture
problems i faced:
mails does not come in, but went to the webhosting company's server instead. are there any other settings beside pointing the nameservers to dyndns?
jhstonAsked:
Who is Participating?

Improve company productivity with a Business Account.Sign Up

x
Advertise Here
 
ToxaconConnect With a Mentor Commented:
DNS is based on zones. A zone contains information about a domain such as administrative contact, mail exchanger (MX), hosts (A) and aliases (CNAME). Someone always owns a zone or domain. The .com domain is owned somewhere in the US and you own the example.com. The DNS is a distributed system and to prevent provider such as DynDNS dying under DNS queries and prevent internet congestion, the zone data is copied accross the world to secondary DNS servers of local ISPs. For example, your domain data should be redownloaded to local cahe every 10800 seconds which is three hours. The zone expires in 604800 seconds which is seven days. Expiration means that zone information older than 7 days must not be used. So, technically, it is possible to receive email to the old MX seven days from the change but usually the ISPs copy it (the copy process is called zone transfer) more frequently.

According to the DNS information, emails to your domain will be primarily sent to mx1.mailhop.org. The mx1.mailhop.org is configured to relay the email to your server mail.example.com. Where the example.com is pointing has no effect on email and it does not technically matter if there is no IP for that at all. However, in practice it does: you can type word 'example' the URL box of your Internet Explorer and it will possibly try to add suffix .com to the address. If your example.com points to your website, the browser can access your website. Otherwise the person needs to type www.example.com.
0
 
ToxaconCommented:
You have to set the MX record to mail.abc.com to receive email.
0
 
jhstonAuthor Commented:
but i thought dyndns says it should point to their server which is mx1.mailhop.org / mx2.mailhop.org ?
0
Get 10% Off Your First Squarespace Website

Ready to showcase your work, publish content or promote your business online? With Squarespace’s award-winning templates and 24/7 customer service, getting started is simple. Head to Squarespace.com and use offer code ‘EXPERTS’ to get 10% off your first purchase.

Start Now
 
ToxaconCommented:
Are you sure that the authorative answer for MX records points to DynDNS? You can easily check that with nslookup.

It means that you must let DynDNS to handle all DNS for your domain and usually the web hosting company does that ==> you must assign DynDNS as your authorative DNS for your domain.
0
 
jhstonAuthor Commented:
Name Servers:
        NS1.MYDYNDNS.ORG
        NS2.MYDYNDNS.ORG
        NS3.MYDYNDNS.ORG
        NS4.MYDYNDNS.ORG
        NS5.MYDYNDNS.ORG
 i did nslookup/whois, and the above name servers were listed. how do you check the mx records of the domain?
0
 
jhstonAuthor Commented:
i check another time using http://network-tools.com/nslook/

the following were listed:

name class type data time to live
example.com IN MX preference: 20
exchange: mx2.mailhop.org
 3600s (1h)
example.com IN MX preference: 10
exchange: mx1.mailhop.org
 3600s (1h)
example.com  IN SOA server: ns1.mydyndns.org
email: zone-admin@dyndns.com
serial: 2011021065
refresh: 10800
retry: 1800
expire: 604800
minimum ttl: 1800
 3600s (1h)
example.com IN A 116.14.24.123 60s (1m)  (this is my server's ip)
example.com IN NS ns4.mydyndns.org 3600s (1h)
example.com IN NS ns2.mydyndns.org 3600s (1h)
example.com IN NS ns5.mydyndns.org 3600s (1h)
example.com IN NS ns3.mydyndns.org 3600s (1h)
example.com IN NS ns1.mydyndns.org 3600s (1h)
0
 
ToxaconCommented:
Everything seems to be ok. How long ago you did the change? Sometimes it takes up to 72 hours to propagate the change accross the Globe as local ISPs have only cached copy (secondaries) of the zone.
0
 
jhstonAuthor Commented:
yes mail comes in now, but it also goes to the webhosting company's server once in a while, i'm login on to the webmail client of the webhosting company's server to make sure mails there get read and forwarded back to us.

by the way, i point everything including www.example.com to my server which i prefer to be hosted by the webhosting company, how do i do this?
i have the ip address of the webhosting company's server.
i mean there are some option on dyndns such as cname/webhop direct/host with ip address/offline hostname... which one do i select?
- will pointing www.example.com to the webhosting company's server affect the mails again?
- i know that i need to point mail.example.com to my server, what about example.com itself, do i point it to my server or the webhosting company's server.

i'm sorry for the the many questions asked, but i am an idiot at this.
0
 
ToxaconCommented:
You create an A record (host record) for host www at your domain example.com.

When a web browser looks for host www.example.com, the DynDNS server has to reply with the IP of the webhosting company.

If your email occasionally goes to webhosting company's email then there is obsolete DNS information still available somewhere in the World.
0
 
ToxaconCommented:
Making www.example.com to point to webhosting IP does not affect email. Configuring example.com IP address depends much about the webhosting company's ability to redirect connection attempts to the host www. Usually they are able to do that automatically. It means that if you type http://example.com to your browser the actual response comes from www.example.com.
0
 
jhstonAuthor Commented:
hi can you further explain what does this mean "If your email occasionally goes to webhosting company's email then there is obsolete DNS information still available somewhere in the World"


another question: do you mean that for mails to come into my server, i only need mail.example.com to point to my server. whether example.com point to my server or not, it does not matter? is this correct?
0
 
jhstonAuthor Commented:
thank u, will observe for the next few days everything seems ok now
0
Question has a verified solution.

Are you are experiencing a similar issue? Get a personalized answer when you ask a related question.

Have a better answer? Share it in a comment.

All Courses

From novice to tech pro — start learning today.