Platform
Your own email domain
The two lines in this guide go at the company that looks after your domain name. That is usually where you bought it, or Cloudflare if you moved it there. It is not where your mailbox lives, and it is not in your email program. Almost everyone who gets stuck is stuck in the wrong control panel, so this is worth checking before you start.
Everything you add sits under a separate name that begins with mg., one level below your domain.
Your normal mail keeps working exactly as it does today. We never ask you to change the SPF record
on your main domain.
What this changes, and what it does not
Your email already carries the name of your shop. What it does not carry is your own web address: the part after the @ still says Puntjes. Setting up your own sending domain changes that part, and nothing else about your email changes.
Staying on the Puntjes address is a normal choice, not a problem to fix. Your customers get their points, their rewards and their wallet passes either way. Nothing on this page is a repair.
Find the panel where your domain lives
You are looking for the place that answers questions about your domain name, not the place that holds your messages. It is one of three:
| Where | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Your registrar | The company you bought the name from. Combell, Versio, GoDaddy, OVH and the rest |
| Cloudflare | If somebody moved your domain there, this is the one that counts |
| A hosting panel | cPanel, DirectAdmin or Plesk, usually reached from your web host's account page |
Once you are in, look for a menu called DNS, DNS records, Zone editor or nameservers. That is where you are adding the lines.
Two panels, one of them empty
If your nameservers point at Cloudflare, the DNS page at your registrar will look nearly empty and nothing you add there has any effect. The records belong wherever the nameservers point. When you are not sure who that is, ask whoever built your website.
Start in Puntjes
Go to Emails, then Email domain. Type the web
address of your shop, without www and without anything in front of it. So bakkerijpeeters.be,
not www.bakkerijpeeters.be and not info@bakkerijpeeters.be. Then press Set up this domain.
If we find something already sitting at that name, we show you what we found before we go any further. That screen is called We already found something at this name. Old leftovers from a setup that stopped working are safe to ignore: press Continue anyway. If you have no idea where they came from, ask whoever looks after your domain first.
A few seconds later the page shows you the lines to add.
The lines to add
Three rows appear. Two of them have to be there before your domain can go live, and the third can wait.
The names below are written out for a shop at bakkerijpeeters.be. Read your own web address
wherever they say that, and check each one against the Name column on the page, which shows the
real thing.
| Type | The name | What it does | Needed now |
|---|---|---|---|
| TXT | mg.bakkerijpeeters.be, and nothing after it | Says our mail service is allowed to send in your name | Yes |
| TXT | a short word we pick, then ._domainkey.mg.bakkerijpeeters.be | Carries the key that signs each message as really yours | Yes |
| CNAME | email.mg.bakkerijpeeters.be | For following links in your email, which is switched off | No |
Only the second name has a piece we choose for you. The other two are exactly what you see above, with your own address in place of the bakery's.
The third row is marked Not needed yet on the page. Add it now or leave it, it makes no difference to whether your mail goes out.
Type each name exactly as the page shows it, and copy each value with the button beside it rather than typing that. One wrong character and the record does nothing, and the DKIM value is around four hundred characters long, so a typo there is hard to spot afterwards.
Your panel may add your domain for you
Many panels put your domain name behind whatever you type in the name field. If the field already shows
.bakkerijpeeters.be beside it, leave that part off and type only what comes in front of it: mg for the first
record, and the word plus ._domainkey.mg for the second. Otherwise you end up with
mg.bakkerijpeeters.be.bakkerijpeeters.be. When in doubt, save one record and look at how the panel lists it.
Why every name starts with mg.
Your mailbox reads its settings from your domain itself. These lines sit one level below that, on a name of its own, so the two never meet. That is the whole reason for the prefix: your existing mail cannot break, because nothing about it is being touched.
We use mg. and not mail. on purpose. A record called mail. very often already exists, put
there by a webmail host or generated by a hosting panel years ago, and adding ours on top of it
would collide with the one your mail already uses.
What "Not found yet" means
Each row has a status. Found means we can see it. Not found yet means we cannot, and shortly after you add a record that is completely normal: a change at your domain can be a few hours on its way to us.
Press Check my lines now to look again. If you press it twice in a row, the page says We just looked. Give your domain a minute and check again. That is a pause, not a failure.
You can close the page. We keep checking on our own, and we email you as soon as your domain is ready. It is usually a few minutes, and it can be a few hours.
The page also shows a date. If the lines have not reached us by then, we clear the setup and free the name, and you can start over whenever you want. Nothing about your email breaks in the meantime, because it keeps leaving from the Puntjes address until your own domain is live.
The DKIM value will not fit
Some DNS panels refuse the key in one piece and ask you to cut it up. This is the most common sticking point on the whole page, and it is not a sign that anything is wrong.
Cut it into chunks of about 250 characters and paste them one after the other in the same record, not in separate records. Do not add spaces of your own, and do not add quotation marks. If your panel puts quotation marks around each chunk by itself, leave them: that is the panel doing its job.
Open It is not working. What now? on the page for the short version of this, plus a reminder of where the records go.
When your domain is live
The page tells you the address your email now leaves from, and the words via Puntjes disappear from the from line. That is the visible result of the work you just did, and it is the reason the DKIM key had to be exact.
Leave the lines where they are. They are not a one-off step that you can tidy away afterwards; they are what keeps your domain working.
If the lines disappear later
Sometimes a record gets deleted during a website move, or a domain is transferred and arrives without them. When we can no longer find them, three things happen. Your email goes out from the Puntjes address again, so every message still reaches your customers. We tell you. And as soon as the records come back, we switch over on our own, so you never set the same domain up twice.
Removing it
Remove this domain sits at the bottom of the page. Your next email leaves from the Puntjes address straight away, and the lines at your domain stop doing anything, so you can delete them there whenever it suits you. You can set the same domain up again later if you change your mind.