Redirect Personal Domain Email to Protonmail Using Cpanel
These are step-by-step instructions on how to get your personal domain’s emails to be handled directly by Protonmail using Cpanel administration tool used by many hosting providers. The Cpanel part of the instructions are most likely applicable to redirecting your email to any third party email system. From a broad overview, you need to add your domain, verify it, create email addresses to be used, make sure the emails are being sent to Protonmail for processing.
- In order to have something to verify, first go to Settings in the Protonmail interface. Go to “Domains” and choose “Add Domain”. This will provide a list of red icons, indicating the parts you have not set up yet. The first thing you need to do is verify the domain.
- Still in the Settings area of Protonmail, select the red “Verify” button to get a special TXT value for verification purposes.
- Next go to your domain’s Cpanel and in the “Domains” section, select “Zone Editor”. Do NOT click on the “+ Record” button. It does not give you enough options. Select the “Manage” button instead. For me, this was “the trick” you needed to know.
- It is not necessary, but at this point you can filter by the type of record you are going to add to see what you already have. Select the “Add Record” dropdown and then choose “+TXT Record”. The instructions from Protonmail gave the “@” symbol for domain name but they also said if that didn’t work enter your domain. They also said to use a low number for TTL and I used 10. The “Record” field is for the special text string that Protonmail generated when you selected the “Verify” button.
- It will take a while until your domain is verified. My “TXT” icon did turn green before I got a confirmation email from Protonmail, saying my domain was verified. Next, you can create email addresses at Protonmail because your domain will not be available in the dropdown at Settingsβ Domainsβ Custom Domain Addressβ Add Address.
- The final step is to get the email sent directly to Protonmail by adding proper “MX” values. Note that this is NOT done in the “Emails” section. There is a note directing away from the intuitive “Email Routing” choice.
- So, like the sign says, go to the Zone Editor in the Domains section and do NOT use +Record button as described above, Use the “Manage” link. Choose “Add Record” button dropdown and then “Add MX Record”. In August 2020 there were two entries I was given by Protonmail: mail.protonmail.ch which I have as priority 10 and mailsec.protonmail.ch with priority 20. I kept the original with priority 100. Some people say it is better to get rid of it. Also, some domain managers required an ending “.” in the address but mine did not.
Remarks
- I have only sent a couple of test emails, but with these settings, emails seem to go directly to Protonmail and not to the server my site is hosted on. This is the behavior I was looking for in order to use encrypted email.
- While the protonmail site did not have specific instructions for Cpanel, Prontonmail Help does have instructions for GoDaddy and Namecheap, among others.