I’m trying to use a custom email for bangorwineandcheese.com, which is hosted on Netlify using the custom domain feature. The domain is registered elsewhere, and I’ve set the DNS records to use Netlify’s servers.
I’ve set the MX records to match, but I’m still getting emails kicked back with a 400 error which is apparently due to an A record pointing to the wrong place. The error message says “all config must be empty.”
It’s been over 24 hours since the last time I made an update to the DNS records. I’ve been sending test messages every day since I changed the MX records a few days ago.
I see that A records are managed by Netlify and I can’t update them myself, which leaves me with two questions:
How can I fix this?
Will altering the A record on Netlify affect the deployed site?
Hi, @mike, and welcome to our Netlify community site.
I believe the issue occurring and the solution for it are both explained in more detail here:
The section titled “I did not copy my records before switching name servers and my email (or other service) stopped working. How do I fix this?” should help.
I suspect what happened is that domain was moved to Netlify DNS but not all existing DNS records were copied to our service first. This is the most likely root cause and there are solutions (more than one) discussed in the topic linked to above.
Regarding the specifics here, I see the following MX record for bangorwineandcheese.com:
Note, I’m including the dig commands to find the record. (I find dig to be indispensable for troubleshooting DNS issues.) If you don’t have dig installed locally you can use this online version of it here instead:
So, there is an MX record but the target of the MX record itself doesn’t exist - the target being mail.bangorwineandcheese.com. Here is the dig output for that name:
Note, there was no CNAME, A, or AAAA record returned. Instead I got the SOA (start of authority) record for the domain. In other words, the DNS server said, “The name mail.bangorwineandcheese.com is unknown and so here is the SOA record instead.”
The solution for this will be to create the required records at Netlify and/or (you might do both if you like) revert to your previous DNS provider. Copying the required records to Netlify DNS is typically the “fastest” solution.
Please let us know if there are any questions about getting the required records copied (or about implementing a different solution).
After reading the article I see that I missed some records when I initially moved to Netlify. I’ve just updated the MX and CNAME records on Netlify DNS to match my domain registrar’s records. There is no existing AAAA record to copy from my registrar’s DNS, so I’m not exactly sure what to do with that. Is the AAAA record necessary?
Can I get assistance updating the A and AAAA (if needed) records on Netlify DNS? There doesn’t seem to be an option to update those particular records myself.
Hi, @mike, in many instance there will be no AAAA record for the mail server (and, in fact, it is fairly rare currently).
There isn’t a way to edit existing DNS records in Netlify DNS at this time. The solution is to create the new record first and then to delete the old one.
If there are other questions we are happy to answer.
Anyone? If the solution is to create a new A record and delete the old one, how do I go about getting access to do that? Can someone at Netlify delete the existing A record?
