Email and Email Forwarding?

Apparently, Netlify doesn’t offer email or email forwarding. My domain is registered with Godaddy and will remain there. It has one email which is forwarded. After I switch hosting to Netlify, will I still be able to use that email setup? Thanks.

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If you switch only the hosting to Netlify, your forwarded e-mail will continue t work as it does now. If you switch hosting and DNS to Netlify, you will need to ensure that the forwarding entry is included in your DNS specification on Netlify. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t work, you just have to pay attention to what you’re doing. You might take a screen shot of two of your GoDaddy DNS page(s) for reference when you’re setting up Netlify to handle your DNS, if you decide to go that way.

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Thanks. I thought that when you move from one hosting provider to another, you need to change your DNS settings to point to the new host? Or perhaps you mean actually switching the domain registration to Netlify?

Yes, that is correct, but your original post indicated that you are not switching your e-mail, so there is no need to edit your DNS setting for e-mail. You can have your website on one host/server, your e-mail on a different host/server, etc.

Ok, thanks…

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you might give this post a read through -

as well.

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Thanks. ImprovMX may or may not work for my situation. I have new domain name registered with Godaddy. Currently, it has no email associated with it as Godaddy will not provide one unless they host the domain. In this situation, can ImprovMX help?

What @gregraven said is true:

  1. you don’t have to host DNS here. Be aware of the best practices around site configuration to activate our CDN in this case (TL;DR use www.yourdomain.com not yourdomain.com for your PRIMARY CUSTOM DOMAIN in the Domain settings page in your site config)
  2. if you do host DNS here, move all the records that you see at godaddy! Many of those will be required for email. If you’d like, activate our DNS hosting (here: Netlify App) for your domain, and copy all records from godaddy, and then STOP and ask, and Netlify’s Support team can walk all the records to ensure they match. We won’t know about any records you missed, but we can at least confirm that all that you transferred match up and make sense.
  3. if you do host DNS here, you will ACTIVATE it by changing the nameserver list at godaddy to the ones you see in our UI.
  4. you can still use godaddy’s mail instead of improvmx if you follow the above instructions.
  5. Netlify is not a registrar, so you don’t need to register your domain through us, nor can you transfer the registration to us - leave it at godaddy (or the registrar of your choice).

Let us know if you’d like help after step 2, or if that least to any followup questions.

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@fool have been struggling with this on and off for a while, if we can keep our mail settings as is with godaddy / outlook that would be great. I’m unsure how we configure the CDN so we dont host DNS with netlify? is there any more information than you have here? i looked on the forums and couldnt see much

It’s hard to give instructions about how not to do something, other than, don’t do it :slight_smile:

When you come to a point in your site setup where it says “activate netlify DNS?” say no. Change no nameservers at godaddy. Change only the bare domain: Configure external DNS for a custom domain | Netlify Docs and WWW: Configure external DNS for a custom domain | Netlify Docs records as described in our docs (you will use the A/CNAME configuration, since godaddy’s DNS is not capable of the fancier record types).

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Yes, ImprovMX will work in your situation.

You have no MX entries in your DNS because you have no e-mail settings, right?

Sign up with ImprovMX, and you will receive MX entries for your DNS. Enter these into either your GoDaddy or Netlify DNS settings (whichever you are using as your SOA), and presto-chango – your email for that domain will be forwarded to your e-mail address of choice.

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It works. I used ImprovMX to redirect all emails to my google gmail account. Thank you for the post!

A post was split to a new topic: Hostgator account for email - dns not working