Amazon AWS Route 53 DNS Settings to Forward Email with ForwardMX Print

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Using ForwardMX with Amazon's AWS Route 53 is one of the original use cases that we built the service for.

In this knowledgebase article, we will go through the whole setup to use ForwardMX as your MX server and receive all your domains emails while using Amazon Route 53 as DNS provider. Now let’s get started.

We assume you already have setup your domain in Route 53.

If that is not the case, check out this guide by Amazon Web Services.

1. Go to your DNS settings

Open Amazon Route 53 and switch to the domain you want add ForwardMX to.

2. Add MX Records

On the DNS panel, tick the box for any MX records and click "Delete" to remove any existing MX records that may be configured on your domain, to prevent deliverability issues.

You'll need the MX Records for your ForwardMX service, which you can find under "MX Records and Setup Instructions" in your ForwardMX account.

In the "Create new record" section, select "Simple Routing".

AWS allows you to create all of the MX records at one time, so it's relatively quick and painless.

Click the "Define Simple Record" button and fill in the form:

  • leave the hostname box empty to specify the root domain, which is where most people want to route email for
  • select MX as the record type
  • select "IP address or another value depending on the record type" for the Value
  • Enter the values for your MX records, for this example we're using:
    10 mx1.forwardmx.net
    20 mx2.forwardmx.net
  • Leave the TTL as default and click "Define Simple Record".

3. Configure the TXT record

Click the "Define Simple Record" button and fill in the form per the screenshot below:

  • leave the hostname box empty to specify the root domain, which is where most people want to route email for
  • select TXT as the record type
  • select "IP address or another value depending on the record type" for the Value
  • Enter the values for the TXT/SPF record, which for all ForwardMX services is 
    "v=spf1 include:_spf.forwardmx.net -all"
  • Leave the TTL as default and click "Define Simple Record".

4. Done

If everything is right it should look something like this:

Click the "Create Records" button and the records will be added and you'll return to the overview screen in Route 53.

Now wait for DNS propagation for these changes, which can be as quick as 5 minutes and as long as 48 hours, and you are ready to receive emails on your Amazon Route 53 domain through ForwardMX.

If you're configuring DKIM, please note that you will need to split the record into two TXT records. See this AWS article for more information.


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