Adding a custom domain

Adding a domain is one field. Open Settings, then the Domain and DNS tab, type your domain, and Issue Mint generates the full set of records straight away and starts checking for them.

Nothing about your newsletter stops or changes while you do this. Your website stays on its {slug}.issuemint.com address, your issues keep going out, and the switch to your own domain happens on its own as the records verify.

What to type in the field

The bare domain, so example.com rather than https://www.example.com/.

Issue Mint strips a scheme, a www. prefix, a port, a path and a trailing dot before storing what you typed, so a pasted address does no harm. What you do need is the ability to edit the domain’s DNS, either at the registrar or wherever the nameservers point now. A subdomain works as well as a whole domain: enter links.example.com and the record set is generated against that instead, which is worth doing when the root of your domain already carries a website you do not want to move.

What Issue Mint refuses, and why

Three things, each with a reason rather than a generic error.

Anything that is not a domain name gets sent back with an example. An issuemint.com address gets refused because those belong to Issue Mint and would collide with platform routing. A domain that is already connected to a newsletter, yours or anybody’s, gets refused because a hostname can only serve one newsletter and whoever has it has already proved they control it.

What happens the moment you add it

Seven records appear in the table immediately: two that point the website at Issue Mint, one for click tracking, three that let the HTTPS certificate renew itself, and a suggested DMARC policy. Five more join them shortly afterwards, once your domain has been registered with Amazon SES, and those five are what let issues come from your own address. Each row has a copy button, and the records page explains what every one of them is for.

Issue Mint also registers three hostnames for you behind the scenes, for the bare domain, www and go, which is what makes an HTTPS certificate possible on each of them. Nothing about that needs your attention unless a certificate later fails to issue.

One visit to your DNS provider, not two

The website records and the sending records land in the same table at the same time, so putting your newsletter on your own domain and sending from your own address are one job.

That is deliberate. Most platforms treat sending from your domain as a second setup step behind its own screen, which means a second trip to your DNS provider weeks later, by which time nobody remembers where the records go. Sending in Issue Mint already works without any of this, so the records are an upgrade you do once rather than a hurdle before your first issue.

What your readers see while records are pending

Nothing different. Your website stays on its issuemint.com address, click tracking keeps running on our host, and issues keep coming from our sending address. The two halves verify independently of each other, and neither one holds the other up.

As each half comes good it switches over quietly. The website moves when the website records verify. Issues start coming from your own address when the sending records verify, and that one gets you an email, because it is the change worth knowing about.

Verify now, and how long to expect

The Verify now button checks every record on demand, and Issue Mint checks on its own besides: every ten minutes for the first two days after a domain is added, then hourly for as long as it stays unverified.

DNS changes take anything from a minute to a few hours to spread, depending on the provider. An hour is a reasonable point to start suspecting a mistake rather than a delay, and how verification works covers what the statuses in the table are telling you.