Connecting Domain to Shopify & Emails on 3rd Party Server

Shopify Discussion
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Hey Shopify Community!

I recently lauched our site and wanted to share my solution to the headache I created when connecting my existing domain to Shopify. This meant for everyone not comfortable with DNS settings and how to manage connecting the domain to Shopify while keeping your emails hosted on the 3rd party server (I’m no expert - but I just spent my entire Saturday learning about them).

Shopify’s instructions to connect your domain are nice easy and straightforward - here https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/domains/add-a-domain/using-existing-domains.

What if you have your email hosted on the same web hosting that provides your domain registration? This is where my headache started. Website DNS A record and CNAME switched to Shopify - perfect. And then my entire company stopped receiving emails… ouch!

This was because of how the mail server and other DNS settings in my web hosting were configured originally. They referred to one another - why? Because that is a nice simple setup when website, email and domain are all held in the same spot.

My advice when connecting your domain to Shopify, to maintain uninterrupted email service - make sure that the MX record refers to your IP address not Shopify’s. Otherwise you will have emails floating in cyberspace looking for the wrong way home!

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Thank you so much for this solution! I also had this problem. I use bluehost as my domain hosting and it took me all day to figure out how to point my mailbox to bluehost directly instead of my site. Your solution wasn’t 100% correct, though, because I couldn’t point the MX Record directly to the IP Address, but had to find out the address for my specific mailbox on the bluehost server.

For anyone else dealing with this, it was located under Advanced/Email/Email Deliverability/Domain/Manage/Mail HELO. This is where I found my box number, which looks something like boxXXXX.bluehost.com with the XXXX for your specific mailbox number. Then, all I had to do was change the MX Host Record to point to this address instead of my website… and wait 4 hours for the TTL so that I could test.

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Thank you gibbonsglass for saving my day! This is exactly the solution I needed.

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This was a concern of mine. The person that I called for assurance/help at BlueHost assured me that I didn’t need to change anything - website works, no issues with email.

I think ever since they switched from the boxXXXX.bluehost.com to mail.yourwebsite.com it solved that issue.