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Does BigCommerce provide a way to forward to external email accounts?

As a BigCommerce consultant, I am often asked if BigCommerce  provide you with forwarding to email accounts. BigCommerce does provide you with email fowarding. This is similar to the postbox system that some manage offices provide for you. You use their business address and they forwarding letters to you, perhaps to your home.

You can have five BigCommerce email forwarding  addresses like accounts@yourdomain.co.uk. Each of these can be forwarded to an external  email address service, such as yahoo, AOL, hotmail etc. You then reply to received email from these services and not using BigCommerce. Some of these email providers allow you to set the “reply-to” an email address to one on your BigCommerce domain, such as accounts@yourdomain.co.uk .  The down side to this is although customers will reply to your BigCommerce address, the email may contain text inserted by the service e.g. hotmail, AOL etc. Having your own email server is a much cleaner approach.We can provide you with your own email accounts service if you need them for just £33 pa.   If you have bought your own email service  you will need to set up the DNS to point to your shop for web pages and your  email server. This is something we can do for you for a small charge or see here for an example of seting up when using 123-reg as your DNS server for your BigCommerce email.

To set up your BigCommerce email forwarding

1. In the BigCommerce control panel, find the  Settings COG  and select DNS Records in Server Settings. In some versions it may be located under Setup & ToolsDNS Records.

2. Select the Mail Servers tab, you will see five forwarding email addresses entries.  Change these to your preferred “display” address  e.g. fredbloggs@your domain.co.uk

3. The change the forward email address to your hotmail, yahoo etc.

4. Either change or add more address or Save your changes. Emails sent to the left hand email addresses will be forwarded to the right hand account. Note: You can forward more than one email addresses to the same email.

Pointing a 123-reg registered domain at your BigCommerce store

If you have bought a BigCommerce site through us then as a reseller we will complete this process for you if you wish at no charge.

Ok so you’ve registered your domain name with 123-reg and you now want to point it at your new BigCommerce store.  Where do you start?

Well first a little background, to find your webpage on the WWW, this daisy chain occurs:

Registrar info -> Name Server info -> DNS info -> Locates your hosting -> Serves a webpage

Registrar’s setting

As 123-reg are your domain’s registrars they control the setting that says where your name server is.   There is a menu option on 123-reg to change the name server.  You can change this to whatever  BigCommerce tells you is the setting for your shop.

Name server

Every site has a name server – this tells everyone where your website and mail server information (DNS) can be found. The setting you’ll find probably look like or similar to this:

ns.123-reg.co.uk [required]
ns2.123-reg.co.uk [required]

These are BigCommerce settings for 123-reg

ns1.bigcommerce.com [required]
ns2.bigcommerce.com [required]
ns3.bigcommerce.com [optional]

123-reg has a menu option to change your name server (i.e. the NS setting) in the control panel. These setting will probably be, the same as above, however your e-shop documentation will tell you the BigCommerce settings

Once the Name server is set up, you can then set up the DNS on that name server to point to your web and mail servers.

Setting  the DNS.

This holds the IP address etc of your mail and web servers.  Currently the DNS is at 123-reg, and points www.yoursite.co.uk to my hosting server 212.48.66.162 or a 123-reg default

Current settings  for my website hosting will be:
yoursite.co.uk A   212.48.66.162
*.yoursite.co.uk A 212.48.66.162

These are your example settings for a website shop at BigCommerce whose IP address is 192.200.179.1.

yoursite.co.uk A 192.200.179.1
www.yoursite.co.uk CNAME yoursite.co.uk

The above line just says  http:/www.yoursite.co.uk is the same as https://yoursite.co.uk, i.e. 192.200.179.1 AKA BigCommerce.

Below are the settings should you wish to use our email server (212.48.66.162).  You need to add/change them in BigCommerce’s DNS if you change the nameserver to them.

“yoursite.co.uk” is the 123-reg fully qualified host name

yoursite.co.uk MX 10 webmail.yoursite.co.uk
yoursite.co.uk MX 20 webmail.yoursite.co.uk
webmail.yoursite.co.uk A 212.48.66.162.

For help in setting the BigCommerce DNS entry for external email contact us, as advice is part of our free service given to all businesses that bought their BigCommerce site through us.  If you did not buy BigCommerce through us we may still be able to register you as a client and then offer free advice, otherwise our BigCommerce ‘non-client’ charges are quite modest (£35ph). If you would like to set up the email DNS settings yourself click here for a tutorial.

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