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.

Hey @milespearce 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. :pencil2: 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.

Admin email for new installation

Product Support Self-hosting

milespearce (Miles) March 9, 2023, 5:48pm 4

Success! I started a chat with Cloudways support and they solved the problem almost immediately.

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Admin email for new installation

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