More and more Zenners are turning to Cloudflare for protection rather than operation in recent months.
The email settings required to work with our servers become a bit of a mess if you rely on Cloudflare to handle them.
Cloudflare thinks everything should be proxied and tries to set all the mail settings to proxy and A records.
In Cloudflare, click on the three vertical dots to the right of your domain's name. Select Configure DNS.
If you see a long list already established, you can use the search to find the important mail settings.
For all of the following settings, the Proxy status should be DNS only, and TTL should be set to Auto
There should be only one A record named mail; its IP should be 170.249.205.210.
There should be only one MX record named yoursite.com; its content should be mail.yoursite.com, priority set to 0 (zero), proxy set to DNS only, and TTL set to Auto.
Once you make sure those two exist correctly, you will need to make CNAME listings for:
imap
pop3
smtp
autodiscover
autoconfig
Those should all be set to mail.yoursite.com with the Proxy and TTL as stated above.
The reason for the settings of CNAME versus A type and mail.yoursite.com versus 170.249.205.210 is, in fact, laziness for later.
If your IP address were to change for any reason, you would have to update the IP address for all five settings above. With them as variables (CNAME) of mail.yoursite.com, DNS would automatically find them based on the A record's IP address being changed.
