Sending from your own domain

Applies when your sending is: Sent by Issue Mint, from your domain

Adding a domain to your newsletter moves sending onto it. Once the records verify, issues go out from {slug}@yourdomain.com, signed by your domain, and Issue Mint emails you to say it has happened. There is nothing to switch on and no second setup to work through.

The same record set covers your website and your sending, which is why adding a domain is one visit to your DNS provider rather than two.

The five records that authorise sending

Five of the records Issue Mint generates are the ones that let mail come from your address. They appear shortly after the domain is added, once Amazon has handed back your signing tokens.

The three DKIM records are what a mailbox reads to check that an issue really came from you. The two records on send route bounce notifications back, which is how an address that no longer exists gets taken off your list without you noticing it. All five have to verify. Four out of five leaves your issues on our address.

What DMARC has to do with sending

DMARC is generated alongside the five sending records and is deliberately not required by Issue Mint. It is a suggestion.

Issue Mint never overwrites a policy you already have, and never holds your sending on our address over a record you may not want. If _dmarc already exists on your domain, leave it alone. The suggested monitor-only policy is a reasonable place to start and does nothing to your mail on its own.

Nothing waits for the records

Sending carries on from news.issuemint.com the entire time a domain’s records are pending, and the website records verify independently of the sending ones.

That is the rule the whole design follows: a half-configured domain never delays a send, never fails one, and never blocks publishing. You can add a domain in the middle of writing an issue, send that issue an hour later from our address, and have the next one go from yours.

The promotion happens on its own

When the last of the five records verifies, Issue Mint moves your sending onto your domain without asking and without a settings change on your side.

A newly added domain is rechecked every ten minutes for its first two days, and hourly after that, so the move usually follows your DNS publishing by minutes rather than waiting for some nightly hour. Nothing about the issue you are writing changes, nothing needs re-saving, and no draft has to be touched.

The email that tells you

You get one email, headed with the fact that your DNS records came through, naming the address issues now come from.

It is a report rather than a task. There is no link to click to finish anything, and the only reason it exists is that a change to what your readers see in their inbox should not happen silently. Every message Issue Mint sends an account owner is listed in the emails we send.

What does not change

Your sending is still done by Issue Mint, so the fair-use boundaries on the limits on hosted sending still apply, including the subscriber cap.

Sending from your own domain buys the two things a reader can see, which are your name in the inbox and a signature that matches it, and that is worth having for deliverability as well as for trust. What it does not buy is the sender reputation, because we are still the ones holding the sending account. Moving that too is using your own Amazon SES account, and the trade-offs either way are laid out in what sending gives you.

If you remove the domain

Removing a domain puts sending back on your news.issuemint.com address in the same breath as it puts your website back on its issuemint.com one.

This is worth knowing before you remove a domain you have been sending from for a while, because your readers have been seeing one address and will start seeing another. Issue Mint asks you to type the hostname to confirm, for that reason among others.