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Hi,

This seems like a basic question, but I searched and can't find it asked and answered on the forums here.  Might be a good tutorial topic.

I have internet access and email through bellsouth fastaccess dsl.  I am not running a server.  I now have a domain (no hosting) through Dynadot.  I purchased the domain so that I could have a consistent email address which would not change when changing ISPs.  I don't want to use gmail or other free email for various reasons.

I would like the following scenario to work properly:

-- Someone sends me an email to [email protected]
-- Dynadot sends this email to my email account at bellsouth.net (not forwarding)
-- I reply to the email with [email protected] (using bellsouth's webmail tool or POP'd to Thunderbird)
-- The original sender sees [email protected] in the reply, not [email protected]

(that's what I want to happen)

I understand (from the Dynadot link below) that to achieve this I need do something with MX records.  I used nslookup and found the MX records for bellsouth.net.  But there is a missing piece:  I need some way to tell Bellsouth that they should send incoming mail from mydomain.com to my Bellsouth email account.  I did more searching and found something about Bellsouth requiring SPF and some statement about Dynadot not supporting this?

Just for grins, I've tried email forwarding and (as expected) it behaves exactly as Dynadot described
here.
It's clear to me that I do not want to use email forwarding.

I'm sorry I'm ignorant of the process.  Any assistance you folks can offer is appreciated.  Please assume I know nothing; you won't be too far off.

Thanks,
Dave

Follow-up questions:

1) If I sign up for web hosting ($12/yr) and email hosting ($8/yr) with Dynadot, this solves the problem, right?  Then I can receive mail from mydomain, reply to it, and the recipient sees reply from mydomain?

2) Does "unlimited email accounts" mean that the $12+$8/year, per domain, gives me as many mailboxes as I need, e.g. [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]?

3) Please consider the following:

-- Dynadot web+email hosting set up on mydomain.com.
-- Dynadot email forwarding (no hosting) set up on mydomain.net.
-- Email arrives on mydomain.net, is forwarded to mydomain.com, POP'd to Thunderbird, where I reply to the email in the mydomain.com account.

When the recipient gets my reply, will they see mydomain.com or mydomain.net?

Thanks again,
Dave

2)


[This post has been edited by d_d_wake forest_us on Aug 18, 2007 11:57am.]

In Thunderbird, it's possible to set which e-mail address appears on your outgoing messages by clicking "account settings" and entering any arbitrary info in the first page (Your Name, Email address, Reply-to address, Organisation).

Changing this but leaving all of the other pages of configuration info unchanged in Thunderbird should cause it to send mail out using your ISP's mail service but placing your Dynadot return address in the From: field.

Only case in which this won't work is if your ISP has configured their systems to specifically prohibit this.

Well, that was so doggon' simple, I feel like dope.  But it works great, both directions.

By the way, I did try this technique with gmail just the other day, but it did not work.  It appears that gmail re-writes the T-bird identity info with the info from the gmail account holder.  I supposed I could have done something wrong there, but I don't think so.

I did not try this same process with bellsouth.net, but instead used their webmail to reply to my test mail.  Of course that did not work.

Anyway, thank you for the reply.  It's working now.  We'll give Bellsouth's mail server a try before setting up anything with Dynadot (sorry guys).  I have heard some bad things about mail.bellsouth.net, so we'll see.

Thanks again,
Dave