Pointing a Hover domain at your newsletter

Hover holds every record Issue Mint asks for except one. Hover has no record type that can put a CNAME on the root of a domain, so a Hover 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 Hover keeps the DNS editor

Hover’s DNS editor sits on the domain’s own page, under the DNS tab. Sign in at hover.com, click the domain in your list of domains, open DNS, then Add a record.

The row that opens asks for Type, Hostname, Value and TTL. Hover completes the domain for you, so the Hostname field wants the part in front of it and nothing more: www, go, _dmarc, _acme-challenge.www. A Hostname of @ means the domain itself. Leave TTL at whatever Hover suggests, because Issue Mint reads public DNS and does not mind what the TTL is.

What Hover calls each field

Issue Mint’s Host column is Hover’s Hostname field, and Issue Mint’s Value column is Hover’s Value field, which older Hover screens label Target Host. Type is the same word in both places.

The MX record is the only one with a fourth thing to enter. Hover takes a priority of 10 for that row alongside the target, and the target is the value Issue Mint shows against it.

The records to add

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

Copy the values from the domain tab 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 you can skip.

The bare domain, and the www address

Hover 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 at all, and Hover 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 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 do.

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 Hover appends the domain, so enter 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, and it is worth not putting off. A mailbox that cannot check a signature has only the sending address to go on, and that is most of what deliverability comes down to.

After you save

Hover usually publishes a change within a few minutes. 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.