How To Setup FastMail Using Your Own Domain with DNSimple

Fastmail logo

I’ve been looking around for email hosting services and found some leads from the HackerNews AskHN site. One of the suggestion is FastMail because of the relatively low pricing, good support and can be setup using your own domain. I’m posting this to share my experience on how to setup Fastmail using your own domain with DNSimple.

FastMail

FastMail setup is a breeze. Upon sign up you can readily use a fastmail domain hosted email (fastmail.com; also there is 30-Day free trial). At this point you can you can basically check if fastmail meets your needs for email hosting e.g. storage size, device / calendar sync, setup your own domain. For me, I’m more interested on how easy it is to setup FastMail using your own domain with DNSimple.

DNSimple

Since 2014, I’ve used DNSimple for my DNS needs also posted here the steps when I changed my DNS provider to DNSimple. They have a one click service that will add dns records to help you setup dns records with known services like FastMail.

Dnsimpleoneclick
Dnsimplersandfastmail

Setting Up

First step is from FastMail get the following mail exchange (MX) record values.

Fastmailmxrecords

Configure these record values in DNSimple by adding the MX records.

Dnsimplemxrecord

Note: Do the steps above before adding the FastMail One Click Service from DNSImple. I missed these steps the first time so I ended up not completing the setup.

From FastMail, go to Settings -> Domain. Here you can check if proper MX records are set. If yes, you can see a similar message below.

Fastmailmxgood

From DNSimple, add the FastMail One Click Service to add DNS records needed by FastMail. You need to input the DKIM value from FastMail to complete the setup from DNSimple.

Dnsimplefastmailconfirm

Fastmail will confirm the setup just like the message below.

Fastmaildkimok

Now you are all set with your own domain email hosting. That’s how easy it is to setup FastMail using your own domain with DNSimple.
Keep in touch!

Changing My DNS Provider to DNSimple – What DNS Record?

 

Problem with my current DNS provider – GoDaddy.com

I made a blog post two years ago on how I setup this site File -> New Blog Project. As of this writing, this site is using WordPress and GoDaddy.com for web hosting and DNS. Lately, I have noticed that sometimes I cannot access my website noelarlante.com and its admin page. Its maybe my internet provider is slow? or my internet is totally down? A quick access to Google proves otherwise.

I did a trace route to noelarlante.com and to my surprise I got timeouts (* * *) on after a certain ip address. My main hosting ip address is working which means the domain name resolution is not working due to the time out.

Traceroute has started…

traceroute to noelarlante.com (203.124.115.1), 64 hops max, 72 byte packets

 1  192.168.11.1 (192.168.11.1)  1.474 ms  1.515 ms  1.011 ms

 2  192.168.254.254 (192.168.254.254)  1.785 ms  1.685 ms  1.584 ms

 3  180.191.75.1 (180.191.75.1)  17.557 ms  17.863 ms  17.545 ms

 4  10.109.9.65 (10.109.9.65)  17.431 ms  21.192 ms  17.735 ms

 5  120.28.0.193 (120.28.0.193)  18.478 ms  23.496 ms  17.978 ms

 6  120.28.10.93 (120.28.10.93)  18.563 ms  21.173 ms  18.075 ms

 7  120.28.4.94 (120.28.4.94)  49.112 ms  52.709 ms  48.848 ms

 8  203.169.57.37 (203.169.57.37)  48.052 ms  48.126 ms  46.980 ms

 9  xe-5-2-0-xcr1.sgs.cw.net (195.2.10.214)  87.515 ms  86.563 ms  86.042 ms

10  ae0-xcr1.sng.cw.net (195.2.10.149)  77.411 ms  78.375 ms  76.861 ms

11  * * *

12  * * *

13  * * *

14  * * *

15  * * *

16  * * *

17  * * *

18  * * *

19  * * *

20  * * *

 

Although I still have two more years with GoDaddy DNS, but I have decided to try and use DNSimple.

Moving My DNS service to DNSimple

DNSimple Support page provides a topic on How Transfer Domain Without a Downtime,  which is the perfect information I need to prevent downtime for my website. Transferring a domain to DNSimple was painless. Its just that I missed a step that ended my site to be down for a day – more on that next.

DNS  DNSimpleDomainAddTransfer

Steps on transferring a domain without a downtime

Here are the steps on how to transfer a domain to DNSimple without a downtime based from the Support page of DNSimple. I’ve highlighted the one step I’ve missed.

After doing the *ALL* the steps I thought that I will just need to wait for the DNS to propagate to all servers and then thats it, transfer done. But after awhile I tried to hit noelarlante.com but I got a “Host Unreachable” error on my browser. Something is wrong and I soon figured that there is a disconnect from my DNS to my hosting server.

Problem Solved – I Missed Adding DNS Records

According to Wiki – DNS records or resource records (RR) is the basic data element in the domain name system.
There are many record types that you can use. DNSimple support has the information about each of them – http://support.dnsimple.com/categories/dns/

 I only care about A, CNAME

A – An A record is an Address. This is the record that maps the address i.e. noelarlante.com to my hosting site

CNAME – CNAME is short for Canonical Name. It is the record that maps an alias to an address. The “www” is considered an alias or an address going to noelarlante.com. If no CNAME with “www” is added to the DNS record, www.noelarlante.com will not be resolved to noelarlante.com.
DNS  DNSimpleAddAliasRecord

DNS  DNSimpleDNSRecords

I got my website a new DNS service provider and so far I’m happy with the response time when I visit my site. This is not in anyway a paid advertisement for DNSimple, I’m just sharing my experience and hope others can find this post and not forget that DNS record step.