I am amalgamating a few of my company's Debian VPSs into 1. I will be serving multiple domains, as well as their sub-domains, all of which will send emails, but not receive them (except for bounces):
my-company.com
alpha.my-company.com
beta.my-company.com
my-other-company.com
EDIT: The alpha.my-company.com
& beta.my-company.com
sites are the main focus here. They are privately accessed SAAS apps that perform a lot of email operations, while the other two are simple static sites that send the odd email.
I am running exim
and dovecot
to send mail. These are legacy systems so I don't want to change the services they use unless I have to. I have this running fine for a single domain. The DKIM, etc is valid.
I run into trouble when I have multiple domains. My provider says that my PTR should point to the hostname. As is my understanding, the hostname should be a canonical name of the machine itself, not a domain name. Makes sense.
The default hostname is something like 12345.hosting.com
. I think it makes sense to change this to something appropriate to my company, maybe server1
(the FQDN being server1.my-company.com
??). Really not sure about this.
Would I need an A
record (or a CNAME
in the my-company.com
DNS zone) to point to this FQDN even though I won't serve a default site via nginx
? Would it make more sense to name the hostname mail.my-company.com
so that there would be a legitimate MX record pointing to that domain?
I guess my confusion is that if the hostname is not a domain name, then wouldn't creating records for it effectively make it a domain name?
I'm using mail-tester.com and mxtoolbox.com to test my deliverability.