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Trying to use Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) but it requires me to add an MX record to my registrar.

According to many sources, including this one, I'm not allowed to have a CNAME record together with an MX record.

Well, tough luck for me, my host requires me to use a CNAME so I already have that set up.

Other email providers, like Google (although I want to avoid them), also makes use of MX records to point stuff in the right direction.

What am I to do?

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Yeats
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  • Are you using SES for inbound email? If not, and all you're using them for is sending mail, you don't need to touch your MX records. – EEAA Jul 12 '16 at 19:23
  • @EEAA Yeah, I don't really understand the "send mail only" use case, but yeah, I want to both receive and send email. – Yeats Jul 12 '16 at 19:25
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    It's unclear what your current DNS situation is. Please add details on what records you currently have, and which you think you need to add to start using SES. – EEAA Jul 12 '16 at 19:55

1 Answers1

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For each email zone (think the part of the email address that comes after the @ symbol), you can only have a single set of MX records that are the authoritative destination for emails send to that domain. If you want to also receive at SES, you'll need to use a subdomain and set MX records separately for that subdomain.

In this case, you'd have MX records that look like:

Zone             MX                 Priority
--------------------------------------------
example.com      mx.example.com     10
                 mx2.example.com    20
sub.example.com  mx.ses.amazon.com  10
                 mx2.ses.amazon.com 20

(I'm making up the server name for SES)

Per your comment, "send only" is used all of the time for transactional and/or notification-type email.

EEAA
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