You can host your website with us and your email elsewhere. It is a common arrangement and works well, provided the DNS is right.
What has to change
- MX records must point at the mail provider instead of our server
- SPF must authorise the provider – and only them, if we are no longer sending your mail
- DKIM records supplied by the provider must be added
- Any autodiscover records the provider asks for
The step that is always forgotten
Changing the MX records is not enough on its own. The server also has to be told to stop trying to deliver your mail locally. If it is not, mail sent from your own website – order confirmations, contact form messages, password resets – will be delivered to a mailbox on our server that nobody reads, while mail from the outside world arrives correctly at the external provider.
This produces the classic symptom: everything works except messages from your own site, which vanish without a bounce. In cPanel this is the Email Routing setting, which needs to be set to Remote Mail Exchanger.
Before you switch
Copy any existing mail across first, lower the TTL on the MX records a day or two beforehand, and expect a short period where mail arrives in both places while DNS settles.
Tell us when you are planning this and we will make sure the routing is set correctly at our end.
