If you recently pointed your domain's MX records to a different mail provider, such as moving your business email to a provider like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, or moving it away from one of those services back to your hosting account, and your email suddenly stopped arriving, bounced, or started showing up twice, the MX record itself is often not the problem. Your hosting account has a separate setting called email routing that controls whether the server treats your domain's mail as local or sends it elsewhere. If this setting still disagrees with your new MX records, mail can get stuck, delivered to the wrong place, or rejected.
What Email Routing Actually Controls
Your MX record tells the wider internet where to send mail for your domain. Email routing is a separate, internal setting on your hosting account that tells your own server how to handle that mail once a message arrives: whether to deliver it to a mailbox on your hosting account, pass it along to a remote mail server, or treat the account as a backup that only holds mail temporarily.
When these two don't agree, you get problems. For example, if your MX record points to an external provider but your hosting account is still configured to treat the domain as local, incoming mail can be delivered twice, or your server may keep trying to accept mail it was never meant to handle.
In cPanel
- Log in to your cPanel account.
- Under the Email section, click Email Routing.
- Select the domain you want to check from the dropdown if you manage more than one.
- You'll see four options: Automatically Detect Configuration, Local Mail Exchanger, Backup Mail Exchanger, and Remote Mail Exchanger.
- If you moved your email to an external provider and your MX records now point away from your hosting account, choose Remote Mail Exchanger. This tells the server to stop trying to deliver mail locally and let the external provider handle it.
- If your email is hosted on your ZIPROF hosting account and the MX records point back to it, choose Automatically Detect Configuration (the usual default) or Local Mail Exchanger.
- Click Save or the relevant change button to apply your selection.
If you only just changed your MX records, give them time to propagate before changing the routing setting. Changing routing too early, before the new MX records are visible everywhere, can cause mail to bounce in the meantime.
In DirectAdmin
DirectAdmin does not have a separate local/remote routing toggle in the same way cPanel does. Mail delivery follows your domain's MX record directly: whichever mail server the MX record points to is the one that receives the mail. This means that if you're migrating email away from your DirectAdmin-hosted account, the fix is simpler but needs to be thorough:
- Make sure the old MX record pointing to your hosting account has been fully replaced with the new provider's MX records in DNS Management.
- If you're not keeping email on your hosting account at all, remove the email accounts for that domain from Email Accounts once the migration is confirmed working, so your server doesn't keep accepting mail for addresses that have moved elsewhere.
- If email is moving back to your hosting account, make sure the MX record points to your hosting server's mail hostname and that any email accounts you need exist under Email Accounts.
Signs You Have a Routing Mismatch
- Mail arrives in your old mailbox and your new one at the same time.
- Senders get a bounce-back saying the mailbox doesn't exist, even though you can see it in your new provider's inbox.
- Mail seems to vanish entirely after a provider switch.
If you're seeing any of these after a recent change, check email routing (cPanel) or your MX records (DirectAdmin) before assuming the new provider is at fault.
If you're setting up Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 for the first time, see How to Set Up MX Records for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 for the record values you'll need before adjusting routing.