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 you to sign up for either Standard or Professional plans. 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.

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.

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 "managed" version of the records.

Unfortunately, some DNS providers do not let you set up the exact same domain or subdomain for both sending emails and as your newsletter archive.

For these DNSes, we recommend setting up completely separate subdomains. Try something like this:

• newsletter.janedoe.com for your custom newsletter domain, where readers view archives and subscribe to your newsletter
• mail.janedoe.com for your custom sending domain, where outgoing emails come from

This is the best option to preserve the deliverability of your newsletter.

Yes! If you're taking advantage of Buttondown's multi-newsletter feature, you can set up multiple sending domains for each newsletter for no additional cost.

Also yes, with a caveat: Buttondown tries to be clever and detect when you're sending from the same domain on multiple newsletters. If you're doing this, we'll automatically set up the DNS records for you. If you're having trouble, contact us so we'll take a look.

If you're coming to Buttondown from another service and are importing more than 10,000 subscribers, we require you to send from a custom domain. Otherwise, you can skip setting up a sending domain (though we recommend it anyway!) and use the default sending domains we provide.

SPF softfails can cause your newsletter emails to be marked as spam. A softfail SPF means the email client is suspicious of the email sender's IP address. You can help prevent this by making sure your SPF entry is configured correctly.

Depending on your newsletter configuration, you might have been asked to set up an SPF entry for your custom domain. A SPF entry is a DNS record that begins with the string:

v=spf1

However, you can only use this record once in a single domain. If you're using the same custom email domain for Buttondown and for an inbox provider, such as GSuite, you need to take an extra step to combine the two records.

Instead of having two separate records, like:

v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com

and

v=spf1 include:mailgun.org

Edit the existing record to reference both domains, as shown below:

v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:mailgun.org ~all

If you don't combine the two records, some mailboxes may read the first SPF entry (the GSuite one) and ignore the second (the one sent by Buttondown), which can cause a softfail and lower your newsletter email's deliverability.