Best Practices to Setup Email?

[saint]

Hi, I've setup email in the past on Cloudron in Sogo, but opted to shift email out to a different third-party provider.

The issue that I'm trying to solve for is, there are apps that needs to send out email notifications such as n8n.

But I've set my MX/SPF/DMARC/etc. records for the domain to my third-party email provider, and I'm running email from there.

From what I understand, i won't be able to setup additional MX or SPF records to point to what Cloudron is asking for because I'm already using it to send email with this other provider.

So, is there a way I can still have transaction/marketing/regular emails or even leverage any of the email capabilities of the apps installed on the domain itself, or would I need to either:

• Not have a third-party email provider manage my email on the domain that Cloudron is installed at, and repoint the MX/SPF/PTR/DMARC records back to Cloudron's setup or

• If there some way for the apps to use one of the other domains that I've added in the "Domains & Certs" section instead of the main install domain?

I am not sure about the latter since I've never done much with those domains after adding them.

Thank you.

[svtx]

Yes, that's possible. I ended up using a subdomain for the Cloudron mail system.
Just make sure you set all the required DNS records properly, which is a lot of fun and to set the mailserver in cloudron to use that address, obviously

Addendum:
You can just as well use an external SMTP account as a relay too, it just has to allow masquerading (sending from different addresses on the same domain)

[joseph]

@saint there seems to be some misunderstanding of how email+domain works.

Let's say cloudron.example is your Cloudron's domain and the email for this is hosted somewhere else. It's totally normal for Cloudron apps to be installed in app1.cloudron.example. Those apps can also send email as app@cloudron.example .

• MX record (aka incoming email record) should point to external provider. There is no need to set up additional MX and I am not sure why (you think) Cloudron wants you to set up additional MX . Is it possible that you still have the incoming email flag enabled for this domain ? If so, this should be disabled i.e https://docs.cloudron.io/email/#incoming-email . Once you disable it, Cloudron won't even ask you to set up MX record.

• Cloudron has to set up to send email for the domain . For that, you can use https://docs.cloudron.io/email/#relay-outbound-mails . You may or may not be able to use your external provider for this purpose. To send emails, Cloudron requires domain level email relay which some providers don't implement.

[saint]

Hi @joseph, I keep getting the "Email not configured" notification. When I check it, it tells me my SPF and PTR records did not match.

https://share.zight.com/yAuzNG9Y

For incoming mail, I've got that disabled since I'm already using Purelymail as my email provider. And that seems to work fine, I'm able to send/receive email from the main domain.

For outbound, I'm using the built-in SMTP server.

My initial thought is that it may be related to me not having rDNS configured for the PTR record, so it could cause trouble sending outbound txn/marketing emails from the applications?

[saint]

Hi, any thoughts? Looking at my domains, all of them are set to outbound only in the config. None are inbound.

[nebulon]

Have you tried to setup the DNS records as suggested by the Cloudron dashboard? Mostly from your screenshot this seems like you have to add the Cloudron in question to the SPF for sending out mails and fixup the PTR pointer.

Lastly it appears your IP is on a blocklist, so you should try to get yourself off that by contacting the blocklist provider.

Alternately you could of course also setup an outbound mail relay as @joseph earlier suggested.