How to Add Mx Records in Hostinger Domain, Connect Gmail, Zoho Mail & Other 2026

Sign in to Hostinger and land in hPanel. If you manage more than one domain, use the domain selector at the top of the sidebar to pick the correct one first: MX records are set per domain, so working in the wrong one silently does nothing for the site you meant to fix.

With the right domain selected, click DNS / Nameservers in the left sidebar. This one section controls how the domain resolves and routes traffic, from the A records that point to a web server to the MX records that route mail. There's no separate "email settings" area to hunt for.

Scroll to "Manage DNS records," a short form for adding any entry: a Type dropdown, a Name field, a value field, and a TTL. By default the Type is set to A, Name defaults to @ (the root domain), and there's a "Points to" field for an IP address. It's the same form you'd use to point the domain at a web server, just with a different record type selected.

Open the Type dropdown and choose MX. The form reshapes as soon as you do: the "Points to" field becomes "Mail server," and a new Priority field appears between it and TTL, since mail servers, unlike A records, can be ranked so a domain can list a backup. This is where the mail server value from your provider goes.

Name stays as @ for the root domain in most setups. Mail server and Priority come from your provider, not from Hostinger, and the two providers named in this guide handle it differently.

New Google Workspace accounts use a single record, smtp.google.com at priority 1; accounts set up before 2023 may still run on Google's older five-record set starting with ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. Zoho publishes three records, mx.zoho.com, mx2.zoho.com and mx3.zoho.com, at priorities 10, 20 and 50, though Zoho's own documentation notes these can vary by data centre and tells users to confirm them in the Zoho Mail admin console rather than copying values from a guide.

TTL controls how long the record is cached before DNS servers re-check it. Hostinger's form defaults to 14400 seconds (four hours), which is fine for most setups; lowering it only helps if you're actively troubleshooting and want changes to take effect faster.

Click Add Record once every field is filled in correctly. Hostinger adds it to the domain's DNS zone immediately on their end, but that's only the first half of the process.

The record still has to spread across the wider DNS system before mail actually starts routing through it. If you're moving away from Hostinger's own email, delete the old mx1.hostinger.com / mx2.hostinger.com records once the new ones are confirmed working, rather than leaving both sets in place: a domain publishing mail servers from two different providers at once can deliver mail inconsistently.

Hostinger tells users to allow up to 24 hours for a DNS change to propagate fully, though it's often quicker in practice. Once enough time has passed, send a test email to an address on the domain or use a DNS lookup tool to confirm the MX record is visible and pointing where expected. If mail still isn't arriving after that window, recheck the mail server value and priority character-for-character against your provider's admin console before assuming something else is broken.