Sendgrid can't receive emails in application - php

Question

I'm trying to receive e-mails sended to my account on sendgrid.
So What I basically have is the following:
A sendgrid account linked to http://www.rallypodium.be
A cloudflare account linked to http://www.rallypodium.be server IP adress.
A server on DigitalOcean.
Good, So I'm running Nginx on that server and I want to be able to get the e-mails send to #rallypodium.be to be saved and stored inside of my database wich is on the same DigitalOcean server.
I've set up the Inbound Parse like this:
HOST: www.rallypodium.be
URL: http://www.rallypodium.be/inbound/parse/mail
My domain is whitelabled.
I've read the docs for 10 times and still didn't figure out what I'm doing wrong.
This is how I store them:
public function ReceiveMail(Request $request)
{
DB::table('email')->insert([
'headers' => $request->get('headers'),
'html' => $request->get('html'),
'from' => $request->get('from'),
'to' => $request->get('to'),
'cc' => $request->get('cc'),
'subject' => $request->get('subject'),
'dkim' => $request->get('dkim'),
'spf' => $request->get('spf'),
'envelope' => $request->get('envelope'),
'charsets' => $request->get('charsets'),
'spam_score' => $request->get('spam_score'),
'spam_report' => $request->get('spam_report'),
'attachments' => $request->get('attachments'),
'attachment-info' => $request->get('attachment-info'),
'attachmentX' => $request->get('attachmentX')
]);
return 'ok';
}
If I take a look at the Activity Feed, then I see this:
The error message is the following:
EMAIL: robin#rallypodium.be
REASON: error dialing remote address: dial tcp 104.24.101.114:25: i/o timeout
SMTP-ID: <1f7f313f27fd051b525581562e6af9b5#rallypodium.be>
PROCESSED STRING: August 1, 2016 - 06:53:45PM
MSGID: J1irmehmR_GELI7tIpPXNg.filter0810p1mdw1.1861.579F77CC27.0
oh and this is my cloudflare DNS: http://prntscr.com/c0bjl8
Can someone help me out?
Thanks!

Answer 1

You are essentially trying to receive email through CloudFlare, but unfortunately CloudFlare doesn't proxy SMTP/email traffic.
Instead you'll need to add a grey-clouded record to manage your email, this will allow your email to be routed straight to your origin without CloudFlare blocking it. Note that grey clouded domains can reveal your IP Address, it is therefore recommended to have your email server on a separate server to your webserver; or even better use a Cloud email provider and get emails from them.