milespearce recently installed Discourse on a DigitalOcean droplet and encountered issues setting up admin email for admin@discourse.mydomain.com. Following Discourse’s email setup guide, they configured an A record for the subdomain but were unsure how to route email via Namecheap DNS. Stephen clarified that an MX record, not an A record, directs email traffic — pointing either to the Discourse server or an external provider. milespearce attempted to create the email via Cloudways’ Rackspace addon but received an error indicating the subdomain already existed as a domain or alternate domain. After reviewing Rackspace’s DNS instructions and updating MX and TXT records, the issue persisted. Eventually, milespearce resolved the problem by contacting Cloudways support, who quickly fixed the configuration. The key takeaway is that proper email setup requires correctly configured MX records pointing to the mail provider, and sometimes provider-specific support is needed to resolve domain conflicts or misconfigurations.
I have just installed my first discourse forum on a digital ocean droplet. I read here discourse/docs/INSTALL-email.md at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub that “you must verify and use the subdomain, e.g. discourse.example.com. If you verify the domain only, e.g. example.com, mail will not be configured correctly.”
My problem is that I can’t figure out how to set up email hosting for admin@discourse.mydomain.com. My domain name is hosted at namecheap, and I created an A record for the discourse subdomain to Digital Ocean, but I’m not sure how to point the email DNS for my subdomain to a different IP address using namecheap DNS settings.
Your ‘a’ record points to the server which hosts your Discouse instance.
A different type of DNS record called an ‘mx’ or Mail eXchange will point to the whereabouts of your email.
If you’re using the mail receiver then your MX record would point at the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) of your Discourse instance, otherwise it will point at the mail provider you’ve selected.
Thank you @Stephen! I did add an MX record pointing the discourse subdomain to my hosting account at Cloudways, but when I tried to create the email address using their rackspace addon it says “(!) discourse.mydomain.com already exists as a domain or alternate domain” and does not allow me to create the email address. Edit: realizing now that I only updated one of the DNS records required by Rackspace, and not the MX records. I’ll try this again.
Edit2: I updated the 2 MX records and the TXT record from these instructions https://docs.rackspace.com/support/how-to/set-up-dns-records-for-cloud-office-email/ and am still getting the same error.
Edit: realizing now that I only updated one of the DNS records required by Rackspace, and not the MX records. I’ll try this again.