Noob question about "manage domain" settings in DO

Hi everyone,

It took me about a year to decide to spin up a Mail in a box server on Digital-ocean, but here it is online and ready for mailing and serving me… I thought :frowning:

The next day i run the “check-option” and discovered that my domain & ip was listed in the Spamhause DB.
I must tell that everyting passed the checks the day before.

I followed the install tutorial from the official website off MIAB. I run it on a DO droplet (ubuntu 18.04) and named the droplet to: box.mydomain.com (the same as my hostname).

I created two glue records in my registrar (namecheap) and named them as:
ns1.box.mydomain.com
ns2.box.mydomain.com
and i pointed them to the ip of my DO droplet.

Then i also configured them as nameservers in my registrar as:
ns1.box.mydomain.com
ns2.box.mydomain.com

ok that done, i am coming close to the my question:
In my Digital ocean account (droplet settings of MIAB) i have the option to “manage my domain”
Here i created two A records as:
ns1.box.mydomain.com
ns2.box.mydomain.com
and i pointed them to the ip of my DO droplet of MIAB.

Do i have to add more records here? Or maybe even remove these records, since MIAB handles dns itself? … little confused here :frowning:

Like i said, it’s a noob question and i am still learning, but isn’t that the way how everybody started there journey into experience? :wink:

And i contacted Spamhause to remove my domain from the blocklist, and they responded with, we have unlisted youre domain from the blocklist :slight_smile:
So i don"t want this to happen again.
I did check the ip addres off my MIAB droplet for any blacklisting, before installing MIAB, and the ip was not blacklisted, so i think there must be a problem here with my dns settings somewhere…

I hope someone can help me out here, because i really like Mail in a box for future usage and just bought my domain three days ago.

DO DNS server will have nothing to do with your MiaB installation.

When you set the glue records with your registrar, they point at MiaB, not DO.

MiaB will be the DNS server for the domain under this configuration. MiaB will automatically configure all of your DNS records as they relate to mail.

Be sure to send emails to popular mail providers such as Gmail, Yahoo!, etc., and view the header information of the email to see what they say (“raw message” in Yahoo! and “view source” in Gmail).

Also check outgoing transactions in /var/log/mail.log as sometimes servers will leave messages as to problems they find with your server.

Thanks for you’re super fast and clear explanation.
So for my understanding… I have to remove those 2 records at DO DNS and, leave it empty there and let MIAB handle all DNS…

You don’t have to remove those records, as there is nothing instructing anything to look there and find those records. They are just superfluous to your setup.

Ok…
But if they are superfluous to my setup and they are off no use because nothing is instructing them… isn’t it better to keep things clean and remove them, because I manually added them…

Indeed, then the next person won’t come along and go ‘what the heck?’. But the fact is that there is nothing telling the internet to look at Digital Ocean to find dns entries, so they ARE irrelevant, completely. But it is always nice to keep a clean house and take out the trash.

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Back to the issue at hand:

You can either do a snapshot, and then restore the snapshot to a new droplet (thus getting a new IP)

OR

You can play whack a mole with the blacklists (which isn’t guaranteed to not be an issue even if you take the first option)

OR

You can use a SMTP relay.

First off all, many thanks for the support guys…

Second is my ip and Domain got blocked again :roll_eyes:

I run out of time today, but I’ll try tomorrow to take a snapshot and restore to a new Droplet with new ip.

Or maybe even better is to do it all over with a fresh install of MIAB? Just to be sure I don’t copy the problem over to the new droplet, since I messed up maybe something during install?

I also read somewhere that before installing MIAB, you have to set your host name through ssh?

See at beginning of this link:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-run-your-own-mail-server-with-mail-in-a-box-on-ubuntu-14-04
Apart from the other tutorial, i only added step1 and step2 before installing MIAB.

I did change that accordingly, but this wasn’t written in the tutorial at:
https://mailinabox.email/guide.html

I hope we can spot the problem because I really want to go completely over to MIAB usage…

I would not follow a guide as old as the one you linked at DO.

IIRC, the MiaB takes care of everything on the server. You likely need to know what the hostname will be and use that when you create the server in the DO interface.

Problems related to IP address either should be resolved with the place the reputation is being affected by or sharing your IP address so you may receive assistance here. Note that your IP address is already public information, so you’re not giving any secrets away.

I did not follow the whole guide at DO, only the first two steps… but maybe that was a bad starter after all, since it is for sure an very old guide…

I think it’s better for me to do a newly fresh install, follow
the official guide at MIAB and share my ip over here for further assistance.

I will give it a new try tomorrow and report back…

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