Point your MX records at the filter

Mail Protection sits in front of a mail server you already run. Nothing about your mailboxes changes. The filter receives the mail first, cleans it, and passes what survives on to the server behind it. Pointing your MX records at the filter is the whole of the setup.

If you use our mailboxes, you do not need this

Worth stating plainly, because it is the most common confusion. Business Email already includes spam and virus filtering on every mailbox, inbound and outbound, at no extra cost. If your mail is on mailboxes from us, adding Mail Protection would filter the same mail twice and add nothing.

Mail Protection is for the other case. You run your own mail server, or your mail is with a provider that does not filter inbound mail for spam and viruses. It is a filter in front of a server, not a mailbox of its own.

What changes

Only the MX records change. Your mailboxes, your passwords, your webmail and your existing mail all stay exactly where they are, because the filter forwards to the same server it took the mail from. The change is where the world delivers your mail, not where it lives.

Before you touch DNS

Have your current MX records written down somewhere other than the DNS panel. That is your way back, and a mail domain with no MX records does not bounce politely — it stops receiving.

Lower the TTL on the existing records first if you can. A short TTL means a mistake is undone in minutes rather than hours, and setting it back afterwards costs nothing.

Making the change

Replace the existing MX records with the ones the filter gives you. Remove the old ones rather than leaving them alongside. MX records are tried in order of priority, so a leftover record is a path that skips the filter entirely.

Mail then has to propagate, and a resolver keeps the answer it already holds until its copy expires, so some of your mail will still arrive unfiltered for a while. That is expected rather than a fault. A DNS lookup from five regions shows what resolvers are actually seeing.

Proving it works

Send yourself a message from an outside address, an ordinary one rather than another mailbox on the same domain. It should arrive, and its headers should show it passed through the filter before reaching your server.

Then check the quarantine interface. A filter that is receiving mail and a filter that is being delivered to look identical from the mailbox side, and the difference only shows when something is held back. Releasing a message from quarantine covers what a held message looks like.