Pointing a 123 Reg domain at your newsletter

123 Reg holds every record Issue Mint asks for except the one on the root of the domain. 123 Reg cannot put a CNAME there, so a 123 Reg domain runs on www.yourdomain.com, and Issue Mint offers that address in one click once the rest has verified.

None of this is needed to start. A newsletter publishes and sends from the day you sign up, on its {slug}.issuemint.com address, and adding a domain moves the website and the sending onto yours.

Where Manage DNS is

123 Reg keeps DNS two levels in from the control panel. Sign in at 123-reg.co.uk, open your control panel, go to Domains, choose Manage beside the domain you are using, then open Manage DNS. The screen lists the records the domain already publishes, with a form for adding another.

The form asks for Hostname, Type, TTL and a target, which 123 Reg labels Destination. MX rows add a priority. 123 Reg completes the domain for you, so Hostname takes the prefix on its own: www, go, send, _dmarc, _acme-challenge.www. A Hostname of @ means the domain itself.

The records to add

Seven records exist the moment you add the domain, and 123 Reg accepts six of them.

Copy the values from Settings, then Domain and DNS, rather than from this page. The three _acme-challenge records carry an identifier unique to your account, so no documentation page can print them, and every value in the domain tab has a copy button beside it. The record on go is what serves click tracking links from your own domain instead of ours, and what each record is for covers the rest, including which ones are optional.

The bare domain, and the www address

123 Reg cannot create the record on @, and there is nothing to fix at either end. A CNAME may not sit at the root of a zone beside its NS and SOA records, so a provider has to offer a flattening record type of its own to support the root, and 123 Reg does not.

What happens instead is that www verifies, the apex does not, and Issue Mint offers www.yourdomain.com as your address. It is one click and it is reversible. The apex records stay in the table and keep being checked, so moving your DNS to a provider that flattens apex CNAMEs later means switching back rather than starting again. Choosing between the bare domain and www covers what changes when you take it.

The sending records, which arrive later

Five more records appear once Amazon has handed back your DKIM tokens, which happens on its own shortly after the domain is added.

Each DKIM host is a long token followed by ._domainkey, and 123 Reg appends the domain, so Hostname takes the token and ._domainkey and nothing else. Use the copy button rather than reading the token off the screen, because these are long enough that copying them by hand goes wrong. Until all three verify, issues go out from our address; after they do, they come from yours, which is what sending from your own domain means in practice.

The MX and TXT records both sit on send, a subdomain, so 123 Reg mailboxes on the domain itself are unaffected. The send MX is there so bounce notifications go back to Amazon rather than to your inbox, which is how Issue Mint keeps dead addresses off your list.

After you save

123 Reg usually publishes a change within minutes, though an hour is not unusual. Issue Mint checks a newly added domain every ten minutes for its first two days and hourly after that, so nobody has to sit on the page waiting, and Verify now forces a check immediately.

Certificates issue on their own once the _acme-challenge records resolve, and the HTTPS card on the domain tab tracks each hostname separately from the record’s own state. If a record you are sure about will not verify, the order to check things in starts with the cause that turns out to be the real one most often.