Sending emails from my domain with SendGrid
I have a question that I guess is not just related to SendGrid.
Say, I own a domain mydomain.com. If I want to be able to send emails from, for example, [email protected].
Right now, when I go and manage my domain, I can see that I have added some MX record values added there. By doing this, I am able to send email using Gmail.
However, with Sendgrid I find this a little bit more confusing. I have read through this: http://sendgrid.com/docs/User_Guide/whitelabel_wizard.html -- But I fail to see what should I do. I am using NameCheap, and all it comes to my mind is the following:
-> If I want to use Sendgrid to send emails from my application (Ruby on Rails), will I still be able to access my Gmail account and send emails using the same address ([email protected])? I mean, is it compatible to have both (Gmail and Sendgrid) configuration in my domain?
-> Why with Sendgrid I don't need to add any MX records?
Answer
First and foremost, the MX records for your domain are used only to specify the hostnames of the servers to handle INCOMING mail for your domain - i.e. the MX records have nothing to do with the servers that are used to send outgoing mail. You can use both Gmail's outgoing mail servers and Sendgrid's outgoing mail servers (and any other outgoing SMTP servers for that matter) to send outgoing mail for you domain. The only caveat to this is if you have an SPF record setup for your domain, but you didn't mention one so I won't elaborate.