Changing Your Email Destination with cPanel Shared Hosting
cPanel offers great email service that's hosted locally on your cPanel account itself. However, if you want to use another email service, we offer a simple tool to help you route your email elsewhere using your domain name's MX records, which control the server which receives email sent to your domain.
Using this tool, you'll add MX records from your email provider, let them propagate across the Internet, and then remove the existing MX records. During the propagation time, email could be delivered to either your cPanel shared hosting account or your email provider.
NOTE: Before changing your mail destination (i.e. your domain name's MX records), we recommend setting up your email address on the new service and making sure you have the MX records you need to use.
To Change Your cPanel's Email Destination
- Log in to your Account Manager.
- Click Web Hosting.
- Next to the account you want to use, click Manage.
- In the Email section, click MX Entry.
- From the Domain menu, select the domain name whose email destination you want to change.
- In the Add New Record section, enter the information from your email provider, and then click Add New Record.
NOTE: To prevent possible issues with your email service, we recommend starting with Priority 10 instead of 0 for the MX records you add.
At this point, we recommend waiting up to 48 hours for the changes to your domain name's email settings to propagate across the Internet. However, if your email isn't currently working or you don't mind downtime, you can proceed.
To Finalize Your Changes
- Go to the MX Entry page.
- In the Email Routing section, select Remote Mail Exchanger, and then click Change.
- In the MX Records section, next to the Priority 0 MX record with the Destination that is your domain name, click Remove.
- Click Delete.
While this change propagates, email sent to your domain name might still get delivered to the email address on your cPanel shared hosting account.
