If you'd rather use external mail than our own (eg. gmail, hotmail, etc.), you can achieve this by setting up the MX records to point to that mail service.
What you need to do is access your control panel and then go to Manage the site whose domain you use for the mail. The next step is finding and clicking the 'Custom DNS' button under the Advanced Management Tools. This will call a list with all of the DNS entries available for this domain. If you'd like to read more about DNS, you will find several articles in this knowledge base under the Domain names - DNS & Nameservers.
To add a new record, you would need to go to the 'Add a New Record' tab, this will call several fields you will need to fill out. The first is the domain you wish to use this record with, the second one is whether it's the whole domain you wish to use it for or a subdomain (in most cases you would need to select the domain). Then for the record type you would need to select 'MX' as those are the types of records that control the email.
The MX/SRV priority relates to the order that these records will be in, the smaller number will be higher in the list of records used. For example if you have 5 MX records, one of the is with a priority 0, two are with priority 5 and two are with priority 10, the mail will first try to go through to the first one, if it fails, it will try to go to the two with priority 5 records and then if those fail as well, it will go to the 10s. Setting up several MX records makes it less likely for the email to fail.
In the content area you would need to place the actual value for the record. This will usually be provided in some form from your mail provider and is different with every external mail, so we cannot provide you with this.
The last thing to do is determine the TTL. We recommend leaving the default one, unless your mail provider has advised otherwise.
With everything said so far in mind, we recommend that rather than deleting the default MX record in your control panel, you simply change the priority to 10 or 15 or a higher number, so that your emails can go through to your account with us if all other services should fail.
If you encounter any problems during this process, you can contact us via our phone line or ticket system and we would be more than happy to assist you!
