mail routing

Mail routing is the rule set that decides where email sent to your domain actually goes. Every domain needs this configured somewhere, usually through a DNS record, telling the wider internet which server should receive mail addressed to any name at your address. Without it, mail sent to you has nowhere to land.

For a small business, mail routing usually covers two different jobs that get lumped together in conversation but work a little differently. One is your everyday inbox, handled by a provider like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, where you read and send email as a person. The other is automated mail your own website generates, like a contact form notification, which needs its own routing rule to make sure it lands somewhere real rather than disappearing.

Both rely on the same underlying DNS records pointing at the domain, which is why moving a domain’s DNS or switching hosting providers has to account for mail routing at the same time, not as an afterthought.

Why it matters to you

A contact form that stops routing correctly fails quietly. The form still looks like it works to a visitor, who fills it in and hits submit, but the notification never arrives, and you never find out an enquiry was lost until a customer follows up asking why nobody replied. That is worse than a form that visibly breaks, because nothing on the surface tells you anything went wrong.

Getting mail routing right at the same time as everything else, rather than treating it as a separate afterthought, is what prevents that gap from opening up in the first place.

How I set it up

When I move a domain’s DNS and hosting onto Cloudflare, mail routing gets configured in the same pass, whether that means pointing enquiries at Cloudflare Email Sending, routing them into an existing mailbox, or both. I test a real submission through the live form before calling a site finished, rather than assuming the configuration alone is proof it works.

Where a client’s day-to-day email runs through Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, I make sure the routing rules for that mailbox and the routing rule for the website’s forms agree with each other, since a mismatch between the two is a common source of lost enquiries.

What it looks like in practice

Someone fills out a form on your site. Within a minute or two, an email lands in your regular inbox, wherever that already is, formatted with whatever the visitor typed in. Nothing about the experience feels different from any other email arriving. The routing work is entirely underneath that moment, checked once during setup and then left alone unless something about the domain or the hosting changes later.