Switching to a remote, offsite server for email?

[SacAutos]

Like many of you, I would suppose, you host multiple domains on your servers. Sometimes the customer has us host the website but they have their own email server at their office. I have them update their DNS to point the A record for the domain to our server as well have the www record be an alias for the shared hosting domain.

This all works great unless we have another customer on the same server that attempts to send an email to a box at that domain, or have an automated process (or PHP form) that tries to email a message to a box at that domain. At that point the server gets confused because it "thinks" that because the domain is local the email is also local. Since it isn't local, the message gets rejected and never gets out.

My fix for that problem has always been to change the domain from customerdomain.com to www.customerdomain.com and have the DNS do a URL forward for customerdomain.com to www.customerdomain.com . This works great because customerdomain.com isn't being hosted locally so the MX record is used and the message goes on its merry way.

Having said all of that, I would like to be able to get the email to work right in the first place. I have tried searching the knowledgebase and the forum to no avail. Does ANYBODY know the proper settings of DNS and mail on the server that properly honors the MX record if it's off-server? I'd really like to know!

 

[sautertech]

I've wondered myself!

Would love to hear how to properly set things up to avoid this issue in the first place!

Dave

 

[zeroday]

i host several plesk servers, but 1 is used for mail, it is possible to turn off mail for a server
if you do that, the DNS is checked to deliver the mail, so mail for the same domain is delivered from main server to the correct server (ie when a blog site is sending a mail about a comment to the administrator).

working flawlessly here