Removing a domain

Removing a domain puts your website back on its {slug}.issuemint.com address, moves click tracking back to our host, and returns hosted sending to our address. Nothing about the newsletter itself is deleted, paused or interrupted.

One thing does not survive it: the tracking links inside issues you have already sent point at go.yourdomain.com, and they stop working. That is the reason removal asks you to type the hostname to confirm.

Where to do it, and the confirmation

Settings, then the Domain and DNS tab, at the bottom under Remove this domain. Typing the hostname exactly is the confirmation, and there is a way back out of the form until you press the button.

The typing is not there to be tedious. It is the only irreversible part of the domain system, so it is the one place Issue Mint asks you to prove you meant it, in the same way that deleting a newsletter does.

Your website goes back to its issuemint.com address

Immediately, and with everything on it: the archive, every issue page, the signup form, the sponsor page and the feed. Your free address never went away while the domain was connected, so there is nothing to restore.

Your own domain stops reaching the site. A reader who arrives there gets whatever your DNS provider serves once Issue Mint is no longer answering for it, which is usually an error rather than a redirect, so it is worth pointing the domain somewhere deliberately if you plan to keep using it.

Links in issues you have already sent stop working

The tracking hostname is released as part of the removal, so a click on a link in an old issue no longer resolves.

Clicks that were already recorded stay exactly where they are. Click tracking figures on past issues, the totals on your dashboard and the per-link breakdowns in your issue reports are all unaffected, because they are counts we already hold rather than something read back from the links. What is lost is future clicks from old issues, which for most newsletters is a small tail on anything more than a few weeks old, and for an evergreen archive is worth thinking about before removing the domain.

Sending goes back to our address

If your issues were coming from your own domain, the next one comes from news.issuemint.com again.

Issue Mint detaches the domain from its sending identity as part of the removal and puts your account back on the shared sending address, which is the same address it used before you added the domain and works with nothing configured. No issue in flight is interrupted and no schedule is cancelled. How sending works is the same in both cases, and the difference a reader sees is only the address in the From line.

What removal does not touch

Your subscribers, your issues, your archive, your analytics, your branding, your sponsorship slots and your enquiries.

Removing a domain is a change of address, not a deletion, and it is a separate action from deleting a newsletter or closing an account. Nothing on this page reduces what your newsletter can do: hosted sending, the website, the feed and selling sponsorships all work on the issuemint.com address exactly as they did on yours.

The records left at your DNS provider

Issue Mint cannot remove them, because it has no access to your DNS, so they stay behind at your provider until you delete them.

Left alone, they carry on pointing hostnames at Issue Mint for a site we will no longer serve on them. Worth deleting for tidiness, and worth deleting properly before you point the domain at something else, particularly the _acme-challenge records and the DKIM and MAIL FROM records, which a new email provider may want to set up in the same places.