So, if you have an author newsletter–or, indeed, any other kind of newsletter–your email service will probably ask you to “authenticate your domain” or “align your domain.” They probably even have something adorable that you can copy and paste!
So, the first thing you’re going to need is an email domain. Do not tell Mailerlite or MailChimp or whomever to send mail as your gmail address. You will be blocked. Instead, you presumably have an author website (I mean, it’s the law… okay no but They tell you that you have to have one, and would They lie?) So if you don’t have an author website with a domain name, you probably want to go grab one. Reedsy tells you how to do it here.
So, when you set up your author website, you bought a domain name (the thing people type to get to your website). If you want to know more about DNS, you can go look at my explanation here, but maybe you don’t care and that’ll just make you tense. You can do this without knowing how it works. I mean, you use microwave ovens and do you know how they make food hot? It’s enough that they do, right? I mean, I find this stuff fun, but I’ve been assured that I’m strange and maybe you don’t.
So, again… your mail provider probably gave you adorable strings of text for you to copy and paste. All web-based DNS is basically a series of blanks for you to paste your text into. DO NOT TOUCH WWW. That’s your website. You mainly want to add.
So Mailerlite has this help page, but… the short version is: Either there is a dropdown that says things like A, CNAME, TXT… or there are sections on the page labeled A, CNAME, TXT. Scroll down if you want me to explain what those are, but the main thing is, you need to create the kind of record they’re asking for. Like if they tell you to create a CNAME, you either use the dropdown to say it’s a CNAME or scroll to the section that says CNAME and create the record there. If they tell you to create the thing as a TXT, make sure that the dropdown or section is TXT. The trickiest one might be the SPF record, if you have other stuff in there already. There are online tools that might help… or you might need to involve your ISP. On the other hand, if you own the domain but don’t use it for email, go wild! But generally speaking, it’s safe to ADD to an SPF record. If you don’t know what that other stuff is, leave it alone. Use the online tool to fix the syntax if you have to.
Mailerlite (and presumably the others) will tell you if you did this right. Sometimes it takes a long time for your changes to take effect (your DNS will probably tell you how long) so if they say it takes 4 hours and you’re hammering on Mailerlite after 15 minutes and they don’t see your changes, that’s why. Wait.
Another common issue is that they’ve asked you to copy and paste “something.yourdomain.com” into the box but your DNS provider only wants you to paste “something” into the box and leave the “yourdomain.com” part as understood. Try deleting the “yourdomain.com” part and see if that fixes it.
If they don’t have a confirm button, or if they’re not giving you good information, use what the pros use: MXToolbox. I mean, they’re going to give you a computer jargon reply, but also the reply will be green or red and might include something that will tell you what you did wrong. If you’re really confused, ask the mail provider or your DNS provider. Either should be able to help you. I mean, if you really don’t know how the microwave works, would you go beyond making sure it’s plugged in when trying to figure out why your food isn’t getting hot? but also, someone does not need to be a licensed repairman to heat up an Amy’s frozen entree. I believe you can copy and paste! but there’s no shame in getting help if that’s not working.
Good luck!
As threatened, here is my explanation of what the various DNS thingies (A, CNAME, TXT) mean.
A (or AAAA if they’re using IPv6, but your mail service is almost certainly not asking you do do this): This is an A Record or Address Record and is a name to ip address mapping. (Like Quad9 DNS being 9.9.9.9, or dns9.quad9.net, or Google DNS being 8.8.8.8 or dns.google.) Like I said, it would be weird for them to ask you to create one of these.
CNAME: This is a canonical name, and it’s probably something like saying that listserv._domainkey.yourdoman.com is actually on your mail provider’s server. This is good; they’re sending mail for you and they want to be managing all that domainkey stuff.
TXT: this is what it sounds like, a text record. It includes information about your domain that email uses to make sure that the email is allowed to come from there, and also “verification” for various services that want you to prove you own the domain.
