Setting up inbound email routing
When you add a connection or connections, you entered the IP address and name of your inbound, receiving mail server (the mail server or servers to which Forcepoint Email Security Cloud will send mail when it is received from the Internet) and verified connectivity with your inbound server.
The only thing you need to do for inbound mail is modify the Mail eXchange (MX) records in your organization’s Domain Name System (DNS).
An MX record is an entry in a DNS database that defines the host willing to accept mail for a given machine. Your MX records must route email through Forcepoint Email Security Cloud to your Internet mail gateway.
Contact your DNS manager (usually your Internet service provider (ISP)) and ask them to replace your current MX records with the customer-specific DNS records listed on the Service IP addresses page in the cloud portal (the ones that end in in.mailcontrol.com). For example, they might change:
| Change | From | To |
|---|---|---|
|
MX Preference 1 |
acme.com. IN MX 50 mail.acme.com. | acme.com. IN MX 5 cust0000-1.in.mailcontrol.com. |
|
MX Preference 2 |
acme.com. IN MX 51 mail.acme.com. | acme.com. IN MX 5 cust0000-2.in.mailcontrol.com. |
Make sure they include the trailing period, and ask them to set both of these records to the lowest preference value.
Because Forcepoint Email Security Cloud has a guaranteed 99.999 percent uptime with a geographically distributed network and multiple layers of resilience, you do not need any fallback MX records in addition to the customer-specific DNS records we have provided you. Please ask your DNS manager to remove any fallback MX records.
Fallback routes are susceptible to spammers, anyway. They often deliberately send junk email through fallback routes to evade or reduce the effectiveness of filters on the primary route. Such abuse of fallback routes affects network performance, because the fallback servers are flooded with junk mail. Perhaps most importantly of all, the benefits of network-related filtering techniques on the primary route are severely reduced or lost altogether. You may find that you receive spam or viruses that would otherwise have been blocked by Forcepoint Email Security Cloud’s filters.
It normally takes up to 24 hours to propagate changes to your MX records across the Internet.
To view your MX records, you can use the tool on our website: http://www.websense.com/content/mxrecordchecker.aspx
Enter your domain name, for example acme.com, and click Check MX record.