Pointing a Vercel-managed domain at your newsletter

Vercel DNS holds every record Issue Mint asks for, including the one on the root of the domain. Vercel offers an ALIAS record, which resolves the target and answers with its addresses, and Issue Mint accepts that for the website and click tracking records.

This page is about Vercel DNS, meaning the domain’s name servers point at Vercel. A project deployed on Vercel does not imply that: plenty of Vercel projects sit on domains whose DNS is still at the registrar, and in that case the records go there instead. Working out where your DNS actually lives is the quickest way to be sure.

Adding a domain is optional in the first place. 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 the DNS records are at Vercel

Vercel keeps DNS on the domain rather than on a project. Open the dashboard, go to Domains at account or team level, click the domain, and its DNS records list appears with a form for adding another above it.

The form asks for Name, Type, Value and TTL, and a Priority field appears for MX. Vercel appends the domain, so Name takes the prefix on its own: www, go, send, _dmarc, _acme-challenge.go. An empty Name, or @, means the domain itself.

The records to add

Seven records exist the moment you add the domain.

Copy the values from Settings, then Domain and DNS, 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 are optional.

The record on the bare domain

Enter the root record as an ALIAS with Name left empty and the target Issue Mint shows for it in Value.

Issue Mint lists that record as a CNAME and accepts an ALIAS, because the two say the same thing. A CNAME may not sit at the root of a zone beside its NS and SOA records, so every provider that supports the root at all resolves the target itself and answers with addresses instead. Issue Mint compares those addresses against the target’s own and verifies the record. The www and go records are ordinary CNAMEs and need nothing special.

The three certificate records must stay real CNAMEs. Cloudflare follows them itself to renew your certificate, so a flattened value is genuinely broken there rather than an acceptable substitute, and how HTTPS is issued and renewed explains what that card on the domain tab is telling you.

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 Vercel appends the domain, so Name takes 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.

The MX and TXT records both sit on send, a subdomain, so mail addressed to your domain itself is unaffected. Whatever mail records the zone already holds on the root can stay as they are.

After you save

Vercel publishes a change to its own name servers immediately, and the public resolvers pick it up within minutes. Issue Mint checks a newly added domain every ten minutes for its first two days and hourly after that, and Verify now forces a check immediately.

Certificates issue on their own once the _acme-challenge records resolve. 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.