How to Set Up An E-mail on Hostgator When You Are Using a Go Daddy Domain

Much of my efforts recently having been taken up with tentatively moving into niche websites and also setting up a website for my wife's new business venture. In case you are interested the site I have put together for my wife is here - it is still work in progress, but I pleased with what I have achieved so far. Anyway, a particular criteria was that the e-mail she wanted to use should be associated with the domain name (e.g. mark@domainname.com). When I set up the hosting with Hostgator this seemed straightforward enough, but unfortunately I found that it did not actually work. When I checked with their support I found that this was because I had used a domain name bought at Go Daddy. I bought the domain name from Go Daddy rather than Hostgator because (1) they are cheaper, and (2) Go Daddy offer co.uk domain names and Hostgator do not.

Eventually with the help of support at both Hostgator and Go Daddy, a solution was reached. As it caused me a degree of stress and frustration, I thought I would share this solution with you. So this is what you do:

1. Log into Go Daddy and navigate to the Total DNS Control Panel
2. Look down the C Name table and delete the "mail" entry.
3. Add a new A Record - use "mail.domainname.com" (where "domainname.com" is the domain name you are using - so with my website it was "mail.fenlandtextilestudio.co.uk"). Point this to the IP address that Hostgator gave you when you first signed up.
4. Now go to the MX (mail exchange records) and delete the existing records.
5. Finally, set the MX record to "mail.domainname.com" (where domainname.com is your domain name).

I hope this is useful and works for you if you need it. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any problems and I will do my best to assist. Don't worry about changing the settings for your domain name - if it all goes horribly wrong you can reset to the default values!