Plesk Error: Incorrect combination of DNS records is present in the DNS zone

It took me a minute to work out why this error kept happening – so thought I would share my solution.

We moved to Plesk from Cpanel a few years ago, and honestly – i’ll never go back. There are a few things that work a bit strange, bit its a 100% better product. Additionally, we use Cloudflare for DNS and if you want to enable to Cloudflare proxy then Plesk can’t look after the SSLs as the IP will be obfuscated by Cloudflare.

This has annoyed me in the past, and we have had to leave the proxy off which is a shame – as it offers many benefits.

The Plesk Cloudflare Extension

Thankfully, the team at Plesk have made a great extension that links to the two together and make dealing with SSLs much easier.

The extension is free and installs and links to cloudflare easily. However, the nxt thing you do is important. Tread carefully!

For us – it was important to Import from Cloudflare first. When we first installed this, we made the mistake of pushing to Cloudflare (I don’t recall why we felt this was wise) and it overwrite 100’s of records with incorrect info and just wiped a bunch of custom records we had set up in Cloudflare. We managed to restore them thankfully – but it was a nightmare.

So the second time round, we imported all records from Cloudflare and this worked well. However, a bunch of domains didnt sync correctly and didnt enable auto-sync and I have been spending time working through each one trying to work out why.

Incorrect Number of MX Records

One particular account gave errors;

13-03-2026 17:24:22: MX: Incorrect combination of DNS records is present in the DNS zone

I checked, and it had pulled down two MX records, but not the main one. The two it had pulled were for a subdomain we have configured with Mailgun – and for soem reason it had skipped the main MX Record, meaning if I enabled auto-sync at this point, it would delete the main MX record from Cloudflare, and the clients emails would stop working.

The Solution

It took me a while to work it out, but after some searching it became apparent that it was due to how I had the main MX record set up.

The record was set out;

MX – domain.co.uk. – mail.domain.co.uk.

And the mail. subdomain, was set up like this;

CNAME – mail.domain.co.uk. – domain.co.uk.

And according to this blog post by Major Hayden, the issue exists because we used a CNAME for the mail. subdomain, instead of an A record.

So, in Cloudflare, I deleted the mail. CNAME, recreated it with an A record, synced down from Cloudflare in Plesk for that domain and it worked and enabled Auto Sync.

TL:DR

Your mail MX record points to a CNAME, change to an A record.

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