Sending from a custom domain

Unlike hosting your newsletter on a custom domain, which is largely a cosmetic feature, there are significant benefits to sending your emails from a custom domain.

By default, Buttondown sends your emails from its own domain and webserver. This is a good thing because it lets you focus on writing, editing, and growing your subscriber base, instead of dealing with arcane DNS issues.

However, as your newsletter matures, it might be a good idea to think about sending directly from your domain instead. This has a number of benefits:

• Your emails look more professional. Open and click rates are non-trivially improved for newsletters that are coming from, say, newsletter.this-week-in-poetry.com instead of buttondown.email.
• You can start accruing "domain reputation" for your own domain. This improves the overall engagement rate for your emails. More importantly, that domain reputation travels with you. Even if you leave Buttondown for another service, your domain reputation will stay the same, as that service also allows you to send from a custom domain.

Hosting on a custom domain means using a domain other than buttondown.com to host your newsletter and archives on the web.

Sending from a custom domain means sending outgoing emails from your domain, improving reputation and delivery metrics.

A custom hosting domain requires a paid plan. Sending from a custom domain is available to everyone, because sending emails that actually get delivered is pretty important, and it's scummy to hide that behind a paywall.

"Warming up" is the process of slowly sending to a large list of subscribers to maximize long-term deliverability. When you start sending emails through Buttondown from a new domain, email providers like Gmail and Yahoo need time to recognize you as a legitimate sender.

Buttondown automatically throttles and monitors the performance of new senders to maintain our reputation and your deliverability. We cap the number of emails a newsletter can send in a given hour until you've reached a baseline level of engagement and reputation for your content.

If we detect issues during this process, such as a high number of unsubscribes, complaints, or hard bounces, we will temporarily disable your sending capability and reach out to help resolve the issue.

Start with engaged subscribers. Your first few sends should go to subscribers who are most likely to open and click. Email providers use positive engagement as one of the most important signals for sender reputation.

Encourage replies. A common and effective tactic is to acknowledge the migration in your first few emails and encourage subscribers to reply. This trains email providers to prioritize your emails in inboxes and creates a positive feedback loop for deliverability.

Monitor your performance. Use tools like Google Postmaster Tools to monitor your domain's reputation. See our domain monitoring guide for additional resources.

Be patient. Building a good sender reputation takes time. Follow Buttondown's guidelines, maintain a clean subscriber list, and consistently provide valuable content.

Buttondown offers a "managed" experience for connecting a sending domain. (Your sending domain is the domain that you send emails from — for example, anything@yourdomain.com).

The "managed" experience requires giving Buttondown control over a subdomain of your domain, which you will only use for Buttondown. We recommend that users use mail.example.com or newsletter.example.com, but you can use any subdomain you'd like.

The advantage of "managed" is that Buttondown can continuously update your DNS configuration to verify your domain with a growing number of email-sending partners. As a result, we can shift your newsletter's email traffic across those partners to balance deliverability and reliability, and in case of outages.

If you don't use the "managed" DNS setup (also known as the "manual" setup), everything will work just fine, but we won't be able to switch your newsletter between different email-sending partners for optimal performance.

1. Add your custom domain in Settings as a sending domain.
2. Add the two NS type records that are shown to you in Settings.

Since the "managed" setup takes over a subdomain, it requires a subdomain that you can dedicate to Buttondown — whether that's newsletter.example.com, buttondown.example.com, bd.example.com, or otherwise.

If you want to send from your root domain (example.com), you're very welcome to. You will not see the "managed" DNS option in settings; instead, you'll only see the "manual" records.

Our "managed" setup does require setting NS records. If your domain host does not support NS we'd recommend signing up for DNS management service. Cloudflare is a popular choice, and we also recommend deSEC as a provider based in the EU.

You're welcome to do so! Just add your sending domain in Settings and, when presented with the list of DNS records to add, switch to the "manual" version of the records.