Set up email records in Cloudflare DNS
Cloudflare can manage your DNS while another provider hosts your mailbox. The key is to copy the mail provider's records exactly and keep email traffic outside Cloudflare's web proxy.
Get the records from your mail provider
Open your provider's domain or DNS setup page. You will usually receive some combination of:
- MX records that tell other mail systems where to deliver incoming mail
- SPF and DKIM records that help receiving servers verify outgoing mail
- a DMARC record that sets a policy for mail that fails those checks
- an A, AAAA, or CNAME record for a hostname such as
mail.example.com
Do not reuse sample values from a guide. Hosts, priorities, selectors, and verification tokens belong to your provider and domain.
Add them in Cloudflare
In Cloudflare, open DNS > Records, add each record, and match the name, value, priority, and TTL supplied by your provider. Cloudflare's DNS record reference explains the available record types.
If a hostname points to the server that handles IMAP or SMTP, set it to DNS only. Cloudflare's orange-cloud proxy is for supported web traffic, not mailbox connections.
Check mail before connecting PressedMail
Wait for the provider to confirm the domain, then send a message in and out using its own webmail. This separates DNS or delivery problems from a PressedMail connection problem.
Once the mailbox works at the provider, add it to PressedMail with the provider's IMAP and SMTP values. Start with the custom IMAP and SMTP guide if there is no provider preset.
