How mapping custom domain to Wordpress broke Zoho Mail
I started blogging on WordPress. A **wordpress.com **free blog gives the user a
I am working on making my life Google-free:
- I have stopped using Google Search. I use DuckDuckGo instead.
- I have stopped using Gmail. I have a free account with Zoho Mail. I am trying Fastmail.
- I have some documents in my Google Drive and am removing them
- I have installed CyanogenMod on my Samsung GT N700 or the Note 1. I have not installed Google Play and other Google apps (gapps).
- I got rid of my Blogger account too
The last point is the reason for this post. I got rid of my Blogger account. This was a tough decision because I had started seeing a huge increase in the traffic.
I had to find another blogging platform. I found Ghost. I love it. It is a great platform. I had made up my mind to stick to it. I thought deeply and found that if I were to grow, Ghost may not scale up as easily as WordPress would. The flexibility is not there. I cannot host my blog somewhere else if I wish to. Yes, there are ways to extract static pages from Ghost and host them for free on GitHub Pages. This is just too much work for a guy who just wants hassle-free, flexible publishing. The decision to stop using Ghost was a difficult one as I had started getting attached to it, but a full CMS like WordPress would do me good in the long run.
I had purchased a domain from GoDaddy and mapped the MX records to Zoho Mail. When I moved to WordPress, I decided to move my domain too. The movement was straightforward. WordPress wanted to have full control over my DNS and I was fine with that.
I stopped receiving mails. Somehow, I could send mails but receiving was impossible. I was not aware of this fact because I do not normally receive many mails, but 10-12 days of mail drought was just too much to believe. I raised a question on Zoho’s forum a couple of days ago. A few minutes after I posted the question, I realized that there was a weird connection between my movement to WordPress and the start of the mail drought. I went to my WordPress Dashboard and looked at my DNS records.
There were no MX records!
I added the appropriate MX records and mails started raining and inundating my inbox 🙂
I answered my own question on the Zoho forum. Today I received a mail from a Zoho support person stating facts that are quite obvious to me now :). Zoho is a good service with really meaningful support.:
Generally when you transfer the domain from one provider to another, or when your domain gets expired and you restore it, the DNS records of your domain get reset to the default settings. Hence your website, email etc may not work.
You need to update the A, CNAME, MX records etc in the DNS for the websites, redirections, email to get the settings back to working.
A good short adventure.