Email not working after DNS change
I just recently moved my outset.ws domain to Zeit name servers. That's my 13 years old domain which I'm not using it anymore. It makes sense to point to krasimirtsonev.com. The thing is that I have an email which is used all over the net. I of course want to keep that email. And suddenly I wasn't able to receive messages to it. I started missing some very important emails. Like bills that have to be paid and GitHub notifications.
I spent half a day wondering what is going on. I started migrating some of the services to another email that I know is working. Then it hit me. Of course that is not working. I changed the domain DNS servers and now when the sender is trying to resolve the mail server it fails. I realized that when I received the next "Delivery incomplete" email from Google saying
The recipient server did not accept our requests to connect.
Learn more at https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7720
[outset.ws 35.196.196.42: timed out]
I decided to check what's behind that IP and surprise - it's not my hosting provider but Google. I know that Zeit are building their services on top of the existing GCP and AWS infrastructure. The solution was to set a MX record with the following command:
now dns add <your domain here> @ MX <your mail server here> 10
And a couple of seconds later everything was back to normal. More about working with DNS with Zeit's now here.
I'm writing this blog post for my future me. Apparently adding of a MX record is a standard procedure when pointing one domain to another host. For me was a new thing 😁