Need help with proper DNS record setup if website is hosted on different server than email hosting

English
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Hello,
I’m trying to setup an ecommerce website but plan to have separate hosting for email from my website.

I’m confused on a couple of items about adding Brevo to help send both marketing and transactional emails from my website.

  1. I’m pretty sure that I will need to add both MX and TXT records from both the business email hosting account and Brevo, right?
  2. Do I need to also add DKIM and DMARC records from both the business email hosting service and BREVO? Can I have multiple DKIM and DMARC records added to my dns records?
  3. I know that I can only have one SPF record, but can have both senders listed in that record.
  4. Lastly, if I add a PTR record for reverse dns look-up, do I need to add it from the email hosting service, my website hosting, and or from Brevo? Can multiple PTR records be added to your DNS records?

Hopefully, my questions above make sense.

This is why I am asking about this.

  1. I am using Cloudflare as the registrar to manage my domain.
  2. I’m choosing to host my website and business email so that it makes it easier to switch my website hosting if I so choose to move to a different hosting company without having to incur the hassle of trying to move my email hosting as well.
  3. Cloudflare suggests that it’s not a good idea to host both email and your website on the same server ip address.
    a. If your server goes down you loose both your website and email service at the same time. (No Bueno).
    b. Hackers and bad guys will send spam email to gain access to your website ip address in hopes that your website and email hosting are using the same ip address. That’s how they get around Cloudflare masking your websites ip address. So if your email is hosted elsewhere, they have to work much harder to locate and hack your website.

I have tried to search on this topic, of how to properly configure your dns doing what I’m trying to do, but I haven’t been able to find more specific details about how to setup dns records with the configuration of what I’m trying to do. Most sites give just generic information but don’t go into detail about setting up dns records on how to be able to send and receive email from both hosted email and smtp relay service.

That or I’m an idiot and just making this all too complicated.

Please help!
New and Confused

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Hi @Chadmas , thanks for posting on this community!

Before I add my answers, to be sure: can you confirm if you’re using a Brevo dedicated IP on our side, or is it a shared IP (shared IP is the vast majority of cases for Brevo users)?

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Hello Ahudavert,

It would be a shared IP.

Thank you,
Chadmas

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I am curious about this as well but have a fixed IP. Moved name servers to our registrar but Brevo is expecting the A record to point to the mail fixed IP when we need that one to map to a web server address.

When setting the MX record to point to an alternate A record (in this case MX.domainname) the Brevo DNS validator throws errors because it is looking for a specific top level domain name.

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@Chadmas here is what I can say about your questions, in the case of a shared IP:

  1. You do not need to add an MX on our side (brevo)

  2. The DKIM and DMARC values are provided by us but needs to be added into your DNS hosting provider. You should not have any duplicated DMARC records as this will cause DMARC to fail, although we provide a DMARC record that is customisable by you, we simply push that your DMARC is properly set up regarding the requirements of Gmail + Yahoo.

  3. The spf does not need to be added by you as this is added by us.

  4. PTR is not needed in case of a shared IP

I hope this helps!