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I've set up a domain for a friend (maple-tree.co.uk). He wants to be able to send and receive email at this domain, and it seems to be working, mostly, but not fully. Some mail servers (BTInternet in particular) won't send email to this domain.

I think the problem is likely related to DMARC and MX records, which I seem to be having trouble setting up. The domain is hosted with GoDaddy, and within GoDaddy's tool it shows a DMARC record as follows:

txt @ v=DMARC1; p=none; 1 Hour

And an MX record as follows:

mx mail mail.maple-tree.co.uk. (Priority: 0) 1 Hour

But within CPanel for the domain, although it finds the SPF and DKIM records fine, it claims there is no DMARC record, and dig / nslookup and various online tools don't show the MX record.

Can anyone help?

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Both records are under the wrong name (subdomain). The MX record needs to be under the name that corresponds to the ...@domain of your email address – which generally means it needs to be added to the base domain, not to the mail subdomain or anything like that – whereas he TXT record for DMARC needs to be under the _dmarc subdomain of that.

If you don't have a MX record there, standards-compliant senders will assume that the domain is its own MX – meaning that inbound mail still happens to work as long as you have a single server handling everything. (That is to say, BTInternet's behavior seems non-compliant.) But outbound mail working in that situation depends on how strict the recipient's spam filters are; many will insist on the sender's domain having MX.

The DMARC record is meant exclusively for evaluating mail sent from your domain – it has nothing to do with receiving mail to your domain. So between these two records, BTInternet refusing to send you mail is most likely caused by lack of MX and not DMARC.

As a side topic, even if CPanel's DNS record table is "type-name-value" I would suggest reading it as if the name were the first column instead, as that is really the primary key by which the records are grouped – record types are secondary – and that might make certain kinds of DNS behavior a bit clearer.

Name Type Record
@ MX 0 mail.maple-tree.co.uk.
@ TXT "v=spf1 ..."
_dmarc TXT "v=DMARC1; p=none"
mail A/AAAA ...
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  • Thank you -- this sorted it, and was a very informative answer! Commented Feb 7 at 17:29

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