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I have a dns with cloudflare. In te zone I have 2 A records. One example_com that point to a website and mail.example_com that point to our email server. Now we want to close down the website and only keep the mail server. In the dns, can I take away the example_com record and just keep the mail_example_com? Both are A records

TIA

Anders Yuran

5 Spice ups
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Usually you have www point to your website IP, but if you only use example.com without a www then yes, assuming it isn’t used for something else, you can disable this record. Note I say disable, not delete.

I don’t think you can delete it, especially not if it’s just example.com but you can change the IP it points to or the URL to something else, perhaps redirect it to the same place as email.

1 Spice up
3

I don’t see any reason you can’t delete your website A record. Since your MX A record is pointing to your mail server IP address then it shouldn’t be reliant upon your website A record at all.

With that said, you should definitely be adding some TXT records to strengthen your email security. An SPF TXT record on your root domain as well as a _dmarc TXT record would be wise to add as soon as you can.

1 Spice up
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The security is well protected, I just mentioned the A. It also have Dkim, Spf and dmarc records. The mailserver score 10/10 wherever I test and even gmail accept it according to testresults

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But…because it is a subdomain of your email domain, rather than an alternate domain (eg www.example), I would maybe think about just pointing it to the mail server IP, the issue here is it becomes susceptible to DNS poisoning, because a query for all your dns records by a delegating server will have an empty spot for example.com that never gets overwritten, so it can be poisoned with a bogus IP by splicing attacks.