Can't receive emails from outside my box

[mido]

Greetings,

First of all, thank you to all of the Mail-in-a-box developers for creating a tool that makes it easy to create a mail server with ease. I don’t have much experience in setting up email servers so please go easy :).

So long story short, I can send out emails just fine from my box but I can’t receive any emails from the outside world. I tried sending emails from GMAIL/HOTMAIL/YAHOO to my box but with no luck. My current setup is that Cloduflare handles my DNS and I have setup the MX records correctly in CF. Also, I have used mxtoolbox to confirm that the MX has been setup correctly and it shows all green there https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=mx%3Alexmodo.com&run=toolpage so I guess the DNS has propagated correctly. Here’s a screen capture for my admin

I have ran the test under /root/mailinabox/tests/test_mail.py and the test passed also I tried sending an email to my self through the box and it worked. However, I can’t receive an email from the outside world or through any third party email service provider as I have mentioned above.

[murgero]

You need to set your nameservers at your domain’s registrar (GoDaddy, 1&1, etc).

[mido]

@murgero, even if we are using Cloudflare?

[murgero]

if you want MIAB to manage your DNS, you must set you MIAB server as the nameservers for the domains your box will be receiving email for.

[mido]

@murgero, thanks. So I changed the setup so MIAB can manage the DNS and here’s how I got it setup for now with cloudflare:

1. mail.lexmodo.com is the server that handles the mail server and that’s a separate server than the domain lexmodo.com. So I greyed it out in CF as seen in the attached picture.

   

2. I added MX mail.lexmodo.com as suggested with priority 10 as shown in the above attached picture.

3. In namecheap which is my domain registrar I added the name servers as described in this wiki

   
   

I will really appreciate it if you can confirm my steps and suggest if I’m missing anything. I spent almost 18 hours trying to set it up if everything has been setup correctly then I guess I will have to wait 24-48 hours till the NS propagates and I start receiving emails from outside the box

[murgero]

It looks good, you will need to add cloudflare as a “Secondary DNS Server” in MIAB too. We will see in the next 24-48 hours if it works, good luck!

[just4t]

www record should be an A record not a CNAME … isn’t it?

[mido]

@murgero, so I got all green now

, however, when I do a dig NS mail.lexmodo.com it seems it’s still pointing to CF NS (I confirmed with namecheap that the glue records has been setup correctly). Also, I still can’t get emails from the outside world. So probably it still didn’t propagate fully yet. Almost 12 hours now so I will probably have to wait another 12 hours.

[murgero]

@just4t it can be either (www. is technically a subdomain) but cname is used because it is an alias.

[just4t]

but as a CNAME (alias) would not work in MiaB

[murgero]

The pic you see is on CloudFlares panel, not MIAB.