Using WordPress.com with Register.com Email

  • Unknown's avatar
    charlesrthompson · Member ·

    I never found specific examples in help/forums about using Register.com email with WordPress.com while also ensuring all A name records short of mail. pointed to my blog. As I just successfully got mine going after alot of trial and error I decided to post some tips hoping it helps others. If you have done this before and see any errors or exception please post followups to help others.

    1. Do not do ANYTHING with the DNS settings in register.com until you completely review your register.com settings. In short, you simply need to make apples-to-apples duplicate records between the two services and all will be fine.
    2. Go into your register.com account and bring up the settings for your domain. You need to specifically note the following from register.com and copy them to a text file. Your account may have different servernames so pay attention.
      • MX records. In my case mydomain.com pointed to inbound.registeredsite.com
      • TXT records. In my case mydomain.com had the entry of "v=spf1 ?include:custspf.register.com"
      • CNAME records. While I had a few records for other things the important one for me was mail.mydomain.com was an alias of mymail5.myregisteredsite.com.
    3. Having completed that copy to text, now update the register.com dns entries to include the ns1. , ns2. , and (optional) ns3.wordpress.com nameservers and commit the record.
    4. Now go back to wordpress and add your domain per WordPress instructions.
    5. Set the domain as the primary domain then click the edit button. It should be noted that the domain edit button sometimes wonks out on you. If it does simply substitute your WordPress domain in this string to shortcut into a page that will let you edit the domain. http://mydomain.wordpress.com/wp-admin/paid-upgrades.php?page=domains
    6. You will likely see A, NS, and a CNAME record referencing mydomain.com, mydomain.com, and *.mydomain.com, respectively.
    7. Add the missing MX, TXT, and CNAME records you copied earlier to wordpress using the text fields and ADD button. For the @ directive you’ll see in register.com, just don’t enter anything and all will be well.
    8. Depending on your configuration you should now have an:
      • A name record for mydomain.com
      • NS record for mydomain.com
      • CNAME catchall for *.mydomain.com
      • MX record for mydomain.com handled by inbound.registeredsite.com. with priority 10
      • TXT record for mydomain.com and "v=spf1 ?include:custspf.register.com"
      • CNAME record for mail.mydomain.com that is an alias of mymail5.myregisteredsite.com.
    9. Save the record and now kick back and wait

    It’s going to take some time for all of this to propogate and sort itself out so hang tight. Use the Domain Helper tool to help diagnose any potential issues. The [+] More information link will help you take a peek at the DNS and MX record results.

    In addition, keep in mind that you can also perform an nslookup from a command line utility against your mydomain.com http://www.mydomain.com and mail.mydomain.com to get a better idea of when all the IPs returned are coming from WordPress (at least as it relates to propogation on your ISP) WordPress has a pretty widespread gap of IPs so lookup anything questionable with a WHOIS by IP to get a better idea of what you’re looking at.

    Make sure to use ipconfig /flushdns for any command line interactions and clear your browser cache during your testing phase to ensure you are truly getting the most up to date information.

    If you’ve done all of this correctly you should find your mydomain.com and *.mydomain.com (when not overridden by additional DNS entries not listed here) should load your wordpress site with a URL of mydomain.com. Navigating to mail.mydomain.com in your browser should load the register.com webmail interface, and POP/SMTP functionality from email clients should work as they did before the any of the alterations.

  • Unknown's avatar
    gracejiyoung · Member ·

    Thank you for this! This is great! I’ll point our users here if they run into any Register.com Email issues.

    Let me know if you have any questions regarding this!

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