Adding your records at GoDaddy

GoDaddy takes every Issue Mint record except one, and the exception is the root of the domain, which GoDaddy’s DNS cannot point at a hostname. Everything else is ordinary typing, and the records and what each one does applies here unchanged.

Nothing is broken while the records are pending. Your newsletter keeps sending and its website stays published on the issuemint.com address until the new ones verify.

Open DNS management

Sign in to GoDaddy, open My Products, find the domain in the list and choose DNS. The DNS records table is the screen you want, and Add New Record is the button underneath it.

GoDaddy’s fields are Type, Name, Value and TTL, and for a CNAME it labels the destination Points to. Other providers call that column Target, Content or Data, so a guide written for one of them still maps across cleanly.

Add the www and tracking records

Both of these are CNAME records, and the Name field takes a bare label because GoDaddy appends your domain for you.

The go record is what serves your click tracking links from your own domain rather than ours. GoDaddy’s default TTL of one hour is fine for every record on this page.

Add the certificate and DMARC records

The three certificate records are CNAMEs on _acme-challenge hosts, and their values contain an identifier that exists only inside your account, so copy each one from the domain tab. They are what keeps HTTPS working on each hostname without a renewal ever reaching you.

The DMARC record is a suggestion. If a _dmarc record already exists on your domain, leave it alone rather than replacing it with ours.

Add the sending records when they appear

Five more records arrive in the domain tab a little after you add the domain, once Amazon has minted your DKIM tokens. Adding them is what moves your issues onto your own from address.

For the MX record, GoDaddy gives priority its own field, so put the number there rather than in the value. For the DKIM records, use the copy button beside each one: the host is the token followed by ._domainkey and nothing else, because GoDaddy adds the domain.

Switch your address to www

The root record is the one that will not pass, and the domain tab says so directly once everything around it has verified.

Choosing the www address moves your website and your certificate onto www.yourdomain.com, and sending is unaffected either way. If you later move DNS to a provider that supports a hostname at the root, switching back is one click, because the root records were never deleted. A record that will not verify covers the other reasons a row can sit red, and the root is worth ruling in or out before working through them.