Many hosts have problems with email accounts. I can personally attest to this as I have had tons of different email accounts with various web hosting services or worked on clients sites that used many them. I know how stressful it is when you have an email account with a host that doesn’t function correctly. Chances are you’re probably sweating bullets because your customers can’t reach you and you want a quick fix now!
You’re in luck because if they are using cPanel, there is an easy way to get the problem resolved. For this common problem, you’re just going to want to point your MX records to Gmail or Yahoo, which will support email better than a lot of shared servers. Keep in mind when you change your MX records your not moving your site; you’re still hosting with the same hosting company. You’re just changing your email mail servers. Here is how to change your MX records in cPanel.
Please note you can use Gmail or Yahoo as a backup along with your current self hosted server incase your server goes down.
How Can I Point My MX Mail To Another Server?
Usually, when people route their mail to a new server, it’s because they want to take precautions. They want to have a backup plan in case their permanent site goes down. Obviously, if your website goes down this could mean you’re going to have issues with your email address.
How Can You Do This?
First, you need to go into your cPanel and find the MX icon. Once that is done, choose a domain from your drop-down menu. Select the domain that is associated with the email you want to change the MX records.
Priority Settings
By default, if you have a 0 this means your not using any MX record. Therefore, you are just using the one set up by your hosting provider. Make sure you remove the 0 priority number if you want to route to another mail server. The lower the priority number will mean what your server tries first when routing your email. For example 5, 10, and 20; 5 would be read before 10 and 20. You can use your mail server with your hosting account and then use Gmail and Yahoo as a backup in case your server has any issues.
Point Them To Your Gmail Account
You are going to want to use Gmail’s servers because they are configured to handle significant amounts of emails. It’s free with Gmail unless you have an absolute ton of emails; you can always upgrade to a higher package. But, I like free 🙂 A lot of web hosting companies are not set up to do so. I know they will state that they have an unlimited amount, but this isn’t the case.
Here is what you need to change MX records on Gmail:
| 1 | ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM |
| 5 | ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM |
| 5 | ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM |
| 10 | ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM |
| 10 | ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM |
Point Them To Your Yahoo Account
Just like Gmail you can also use Yahoo Mail if you want. The below is what information you will need to change your MX records:
MX 1 MX1.BIZ.MAIL.YAHOO.COM
MX 5 MX5.BIZ.MAIL.YAHOO.COM
It does take 12-48 hours for the MX records to propagate over.
Thanks for this article, I was looking for something like this.
Does this mean I will start getting emails in my gmail account?
Hey Thomas,
No this means that it will push your emails through Google’s servers. It’s the same email address and everything it just changes the way it passes it to you. Instead of using the servers with your web hosting it uses Google servers, which are better suited for email in many cases.
Can I just give a small warning to those of you who are not so good with technology? I tried changing my MX Records several months back when I was trying Google apps for Business. I don’t know what went wrong, but it didn’t work and I can no longer send emails from that account using outlook. I tried putting the MX records back to what they were before I made the change, but that didn’t rectify the situation. I made a complete mess of it and still haven’t fixed it.
Depending on the host it can take 24-48 hours to propagate over. What do you mean by made a mess of everything though. Can you explain the problem and I can look into it?