This page lists the DNS settings that technically advanced customers can use if they run their DNS nameservers and website elsewhere, but still want Tiger Technologies to host their email.

On this page:

• Restrictions
• DNS entries to add

Restrictions

If you do this, keep these things in mind:

• We can’t handle your mail unless you have an active “hosting” account with us, because the “hosting” account package is what includes the email service. Don’t cancel your Tiger Technologies hosting service, even if you point the website elsewhere.
• If you set things up this way when you first sign up with us, our system will still send you reminders asking you to point your nameservers at our company. You’ll have to contact us and ask us to turn those reminders off.
• This page explains how to point email at Tiger Technologies mail servers. We have a separate page explaining how to point websites at our Web servers if you need it.

DNS entries to add

The DNS entries you should create at the other company are:

@                       MX 0   mx.tigertech.net.

@                       TXT    "v=spf1 include:customers.tigertech.net ?all"
1.tigertech._domainkey  CNAME  1.tigertech.domainkey.tigertech.net.
2.tigertech._domainkey  CNAME  2.tigertech.domainkey.tigertech.net.

lists                   CNAME  lists.example.com.customers.tigertech.net.

autoconfig              CNAME  example.com.customers.tigertech.net.

What do these do? The first entry (the MX entry) makes mail sent to @example.com addresses arrive at our servers.

The second entry is a SPF record which tells the rest of the Internet which servers are authorized to send mail for example.com. If example.com has no existing SPF record, you can use the value exactly as it is written above. If there is an existing SPF record, you can edit and modify that record by adding:

include:customers.tigertech.net

... next to any existing include: values. If a domain name has more than one SPF record, other servers will ignore them all and act as if there were no record at all. It is important to make sure that there is only one of these type of records at any time.

The SPF record, along with the third and fourth entries (domainkey/DKIM records) ensure that you won’t have trouble sending to destinations like Gmail that do strong spam filtering. (If you omit any of these, messages sent to Gmail may bounce with the error “to best protect our users from spam, the message has been blocked. Please visit https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for more information”.)

The “lists” CNAME entry allows Mailman mailing lists to work, and adding the “autoconfig” entry allows the Thunderbird and Outlook mail programs to simplify the setup of new addresses in those programs.

If it’s not clear how to enter these DNS entries at the other company, you’ll need to contact them for assistance. Each company has their own procedure.