Adding your records at Amazon Route 53

Route 53 takes every Issue Mint record apart from the root of the domain, which its alias records cannot reach. Each record is added with Create record inside your hosted zone, and the record set itself is the same one every provider is given.

Nothing waits on this. Your issues go out and your newsletter website stays published on the issuemint.com address until these verify, at which point both move across.

Open the hosted zone

Sign in to the AWS console, open Route 53, choose Hosted zones and then the zone for your domain. Create record is the button, and it can create several records in one pass before you save.

The fields are Record name, Record type, Value, TTL and Routing policy. Simple routing is what you want for all of these, the Alias toggle stays off, and Record name takes the label on its own, with your domain shown beside the box.

Create the www and tracking records

Both are CNAME records. Type the bare label into Record name, put the destination in Value, and leave the Alias toggle alone.

The go record is what puts click tracking on your own domain rather than ours.

Create the certificate and DMARC records

The three certificate records are CNAMEs on _acme-challenge hosts, and their values carry an identifier that only exists inside your account, so copy each one from the domain tab. They are what renews the HTTPS certificate for each hostname from here on.

Route 53 wants a TXT value wrapped in double quotes, so the DMARC value goes into the box with a quote at each end. Issue Mint strips the quotes before it compares, so a quoted value verifies exactly like an unquoted one anywhere else. DMARC is a suggestion, and a _dmarc record you already have should stay.

Create the sending records when they appear

Five more records arrive in the domain tab shortly after the domain is added, once Amazon has minted your DKIM tokens for it. They are what let your issues come from your own address, and they are worth adding the same day.

Two Route 53 habits matter here. The MX record has no separate priority field, so the priority and the mail server go into Value together, priority first. The SPF record is a TXT, so it needs its quotes like the DMARC one. This is DNS for a domain Issue Mint sends from, and it is unrelated to running your own Amazon SES account, which is a separate choice on the sending tab.

Use the www address for the root

Route 53 alias records exist to point the root of a domain at something, but the somethings are AWS resources in your own account and other records in the same hosted zone. The Issue Mint website hostname is neither, so there is no target to choose.

Once www has verified and the root has not, the domain tab offers www.yourdomain.com as your address: one click, reversible, and the root records stay in the table being checked in case you move DNS elsewhere later. If other records are red as well, a record that will not verify works through the rest in order.