DNS without the jargon

If someone has asked you to "add a TXT record" and you are not sure what that means, this is for you. You do not need to become an expert. You need to understand four things well enough to copy them into the right box.

Think of DNS as the internet's phone book for your domain.

When someone types your website address, or when a mail server needs to deliver a message to you, they look your domain up in that phone book. The entries in it are called records, and each kind of record answers a different question.

• MX answers "where do I deliver mail for this domain?" It points at Mailyte's mail servers. Without it, nobody can send you email. It carries a priority number — just the order to try servers in, where lower is tried first.
• TXT records hold plain text that other systems read. Three of the four records Mailyte needs are TXT records, each doing a different job:

The phone book lives with whoever you bought the domain from — your registrar — unless somebody moved it elsewhere. Changes are not instant: the world caches the old answers for a while, which is why a record can be correct and still not be found for up to an hour.

1. Work out who holds your DNS. Usually it is where you bought the domain: Namecheap, GoDaddy, Domain King, Cloudflare, your web developer.
2. Sign in and find the DNS settings. They may be called DNS, DNS Management, Name Servers, Advanced DNS, or Zone Editor.
3. Add each record Mailyte gives you. Copy and paste; do not retype. One wrong character is one failed record.
4. Watch the name field. Some hosts want the full mail.example.com; others add your domain automatically and want just mail, or @ for the domain itself. Getting this wrong produces mail.example.com.example.com, which is the single most common mistake.
5. Save, then wait. Ten minutes is usually enough. An hour is the outside limit.
6. Go back to Mailyte and press Verify.

Your host will not accept the value. Long TXT values sometimes need quotation marks, or need splitting. Ask your host how they want long TXT records entered — it is a normal question.

The record looks right but is not found. Check the name field for a doubled domain, as in step four. Then check you edited the DNS where it actually lives — if your site is behind Cloudflare, that is where your DNS is, not at your registrar.

You cannot find DNS settings at all. Your domain may be managed by whoever built your website. Ask them; the records are safe to share, because DNS is public by design.

You are worried about breaking your website. Adding MX and TXT records does not affect your website. The record that points at your site is a different one, and nothing here touches it.

• Setting up your domain — the actual steps in Mailyte
• Why mail lands in spam — what these records protect you from
• Your first thirty minutes — where this fits in