HACKER Q&A
📣 hannofcart

Is is safe to change my domain's MX records away from Google?


I use Google to manage mails both for myself (personal site) and that of my company. I just set the MX records of these domains to Google's mail servers and it's been working fine ever since.

However, with increasing frequency of the dreaded and un-recoverable Google bans, I am wondering if changing the MX records of a domain to a different email provider has any complications associated with it.

For eg. will an overnight change in MX records be flagged by prominent email providers, resulting in subsequent mails sent from that domain consigned to spam by these providers?

While I know that existing email data may forever be locked out from me, will at least all subsequent communication with other services I use (AWS, Github etc.) or even communication with official Govt agencies (tax department etc.) work fine without getting blocked by spam filters.

My apprehension stems from my understanding that email server management is hard to get working right especially because of how other mail servers flag mails from your server as spam unless it's configured just right. I admit that I'm not very knowledgeable about it. I'm hoping more erudite people here can share pointers/warnings/tips.


  👤 LinuxBender Accepted Answer ✓
While MX is for inbound smtp, there are some programs that will factor in whether or not mail is coming from a listed MX. It is usually a tiny fraction of the spam score though. In my opinion, it is totally fine to set your MX to wherever you want your mail to route. Ensure your outbound mail servers have matching forward and reverse DNS and that you have set up dmarc/spf correctly. If feasible, DKIM sign your outbound emails.

A challenge of using your own MX can be if you then forward those emails to Google. The relays would need to be trusted for your domain and I don't know what options Google provides these days to whitelist the MX relays. Hopefully someone else here that relays to Google could chime in. If you want a more trusted/enterprise solution to relay emails, look into services like ProofPoint. That is their entire business. They will front the inbound and/or outbound email for a company and deal with scam links, spam, malware and other nonsense.


👤 dcminter
Anecdata: I've been using ImprovMX on the free tier for a while for personal stuff and had no issues.