Hello all. I am a new user of InfinityFree and so far, I am learning a lot! I purchased my domain, changed hosting to IF, and set up a small website that is actually working! I am pretty excited about that.
My next step was to set up a personal email server in my home using a Raspberry Pi and Citadel software. I have it set up and running, but I have not been able to send or receive any emails.
I have the ports open on my router. I have added entries to my CNames here on IF, but I’m not sure I did that correctly.
Thanks for the reply! I had read that, but didn’t think it quite answered my question. I am going to look into that. However, I don’t understand why I can point IF to an outside 3rd party provider, but I can’t just point IF to my personal email server? It would seem to me if I can point it to Yandex or Zoho, I should be able to point it to my personal server.
Sorry to be “that guy”, but will you please confirm that I am wrong and need to move on!
As a follow up, my goal is to have 5 email addresses ([email protected], et. al.) and I don’t want to be forced to retrieve via webmail. Does Zoho or Yandex or postale.io offer access via email client (think android phone, Outlook, etc?).
You can use your personal email server if you want. The only thing to note is that we don’t have an option to set custom A records, only CNAME records. And CNAME records can only be used to point to a domain name, not an IP address.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, all you need is a hostname which points to your IP address. You can try either:
Use a Reverse IP Lookup tool and see if there is a distinct hostname assigned to your IP address. A good network operator assigns a domain name to every IP address which you can lookup with a reverse IP tool. You can point your mail subdomain to that hostname with a CNAME record.
Use a dynamic DNS service like noip.com and point the CNAME record to the dynamic DNS hostname.
That said, these records, in addition to the very important MX record, only affect receiving email. If sending email doesn’t work, that’s usually not related to DNS.
The first thing to try is to test email sending with mail-tester.com. That service can tell you why your message could be rejected by other providers. If they also don’t receive the email, then it’s a problem with your mail server.
If you operate your own mail server, you should also have access to the mail server logs, which in my experience can indicate quite well whether the email was accepted by the target provider, and if it doesn’t, why that is.
Where I live, basically all home ISPs block port 25 on their networks. This means it’s not possible to run a mail server at home, at least without using an external mail relay to get the email out of the network. So please make sure that port 25 is allowed on your network.
And finally, many email providers block all email from residential IP addresses. Spamhaus, for example, blocks these addresses too because home mail servers can be spammy. In that case, you’ll also need to use an external relay.
use cloudflare it will allow you to manage your dns and btw add any subdomains you want before hand as after you use cloudflare you won’t be able to add more subdomains .
Then create an a record with the hostname MX or what ever you want and the ip as your mail server ip
