What could cause MX records in Netlify domain to not appear?

Support
1

Hi all,

We have websites hosted with Netlify and our externally registered custom domain managed in Netlify.

We’re moving to Google Workspaces from a different setup using ImprovMX and have updated the DNS records. This involved removing the TXT and MX records used by ImprovMX (as described on this page) and adding those required by Google Workspaces (as described on this page).

The resulting MX records look like this in Netlify:

dns-1
dns-11223×516 39.7 KB

With the TXT records looking like this:

TXT records

We also have a bunch of NETLIFY records (for the various sites hosted as subdomains) as well as a few CNAME records associated with Stripe I believe:

CNAME records

The domain is registered with Crazy Domains and the DNS there (including the name server changes) looks like this:

Domain registrar DNS

I don’t think those records do anything as a result of using Netlify DNS (I could be wrong).

The problem is that for some reason the old MX records have disappeared without the new ones appearing. The result being we’re not receiving any email (!!). The changes were made 5 or 6 hours ago now.

Having chatted with the Google team, their advice is to wait for up to 72 hours, but obviously that’s a very long time to wait if the issue isn’t just propagation time. My questions are:

  1. Is there anything obviously wrong with the setup above?
  2. Are there any troubleshooting steps I should be taking?
  3. Can I add the old ImprovMX-related MX and TXT records back alongside the Google ones as a “fallback”?
  4. Is there anything else you’d recommend for us in this desperate situation?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
Dave

2

Hey @daveadams,

Good you asked, turns out the records had not got added to our backend, which I’ve synced now. Are you still seeing issues?

1 Like
3

Hi @hrishikesh,

It appears to be working now. You’re a lifesaver!

Is there anything we should do in the future to avoid this issue, or was it a one-off?

Edit: I did notice that the priorities seems to have changed (i.e., they’re all 10 instead of the ones that we entered as on this page). Our tests are all working so unless you think it should change I’m happy to leave it as is as we’re now getting email again.

Cheers,
Dave

4

The issue about the records not getting added to our backend is something i’ve seen time and again. It’s not consistent and happens randomly, so a few users like yourself have seen this happen.

About the priority, that just tells the DNS resolver, which of multiple records should be given higher priority. It won’t have a huge impact for most users, but some apps might need some specific configuration. if yours doesn’t, you can leave it as it is. I did not restore the priority when adding the records to the backend, so this is an error on my end. But if it’s working for you, I guess that solves it.

1 Like
5

We may be facing the same issue at the moment. Could you perhaps help please?

For context: MX records not propogating