I recently needed to buy a few domain names, and among them, a .fr. For historical reasons I usually use gandi.net as registrar, they are know to be pretty good at what they do, but also to be a bit expensive.
So, choice number one was Gandi.net, problem, a .fr costs 14.40€ + VAT = 17,28€/year.
Choice number two, any other registrar which also offers email forwarding for free. The one I chose costs me 7,98€/year, with email forwarding :
For those who don't know how mail forwarding works, usually it's as follow :
You add MX (Mail eXchanger) records to your DNS zone file, and make them point to the registrars's MX servers. This is how a server knows where to send the email for another domain : it asks the DNS for the recipient's domain MX servers.
The servers also maintain a list of forwards, usually in the form : from_address : to_address in a file (or database).
After configuring my DNS on Cloudflare, because they offer interesting protection services together with fast DNS, I built my website. And through the pages I added references to an email of the form [email protected], of course.
Then I went to my registrar dashboard and select : Email forwarding.
So far, so goo, let's select Email Forwarding now...
What is that ? Where do I enter the email addresses ? I called support, first through Live chat. After a while the guy told me that he can't do anything and the case was escalated to "level 2", I had nothing to do but wait for an email. No tracking number, nothing. Not a good sign.
The next day I received an email, with the chat log attached. The email reads :
Which is totally irrelevant. After 3 or 4 more emails, they understood what I want, and their last email is :
So now everything is clear. Either use their slow name servers. and you can get the FREE forwarding feature they are talking about, or, fuck off.
Even if you move back to their DNS and activate email forwarding, they can stop the service any time for any reason :
For the LOL
What are the MX servers for their own domain ?
Conclusion
If you buy a .fr, or any ccTLD domain, be very careful and don't look only the price. Ask them if they do what you want and what they say.
