Where to add MX records at your registrar
The records are identical everywhere; only the form changes. Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace and Route 53 — and the trap each one sets.
Every provider hands you the same four records and every registrar hides them somewhere different. The records are not the hard part. Finding the screen, and noticing the setting that silently overrides what you just typed, is the hard part.
Cloudflare
DNS → Records → Add record. Choose type MX, put @
in the name, the mail host in the content field, and the priority in its own box.
- MX records are never proxied — there is no orange cloud to worry about. If you see one, you are editing an A record by mistake.
- The trap: if Email Routing is enabled on the zone, Cloudflare owns the MX records and will restore its own. Disable Email Routing before adding yours, or they will quietly reappear.
GoDaddy
My Products → Domain → DNS → Manage DNS. Use @ as the host for
the root domain. GoDaddy asks for priority as a separate field.
- The trap: if the domain ever had a GoDaddy email product attached, MX records pointing at
secureserver.netare already there. Delete them. Two sets of MX records means mail follows whichever has the lower priority number, which will not be yours. - GoDaddy appends the domain for you, so enter
@rather than the full domain name.
Namecheap
Domain List → Manage → Advanced DNS. This one has a genuine trip-wire that costs people entire afternoons.
- The trap: the Mail Settings dropdown must be set to Custom MX. If it is on Email Forwarding or Private Email, your MX records are ignored no matter how correctly you enter them — and the UI does not tell you.
- Use
@for the host. Namecheap's priority column is separate from the value.
Squarespace Domains
Domains → your domain → DNS → DNS settings. Squarespace inherited Google Domains, so the layout will look familiar if you registered there years ago. Add records under the custom records section.
- The trap: preset records from a Squarespace site or a previous Google Workspace connection sit above your custom ones. Remove the old MX presets rather than adding alongside them.
AWS Route 53
Hosted zones → your zone → Create record. Route 53 does not have a separate priority field — priority and host go in the same value box, space-separated, one per line:
10 mail.snailworkmail.com- The trap: make sure you are editing the hosted zone that the domain's nameservers actually point at. Duplicate hosted zones for the same domain are easy to create and produce edits that change nothing.
The mistake every registrar invites
Some registrars append the domain to whatever you type and some do not. Type
example.com into a field that appends, and you have created a record for
example.com.example.com. It looks right in the form and resolves to nothing.
The fix is to stop trusting the form and check the result. From a terminal:
dig +short MX example.comIf that returns nothing after twenty minutes, the record is wrong or was never saved. If it returns your old provider, you edited a zone that is not in use. Either way the answer is in what resolves, never in what the form displays back to you.
One thing to do before you migrate
If you are moving an existing domain, drop the TTL on the current MX records to five minutes a day before the switch. TTL is how long the rest of the internet caches the old answer, so a 24-hour TTL means senders keep delivering to your old provider for a day after you change it. Lower it first, migrate, then set it back.