Hi all, I’m trying to host a newsletter on Ghost and am new to this. I’ve ChatGPT’d until I can no longer, need help please.
I registered icjoe.com with cloudflare and am using Ghost for newsletters. I want to manage auto response emails etc so i got Zapier. I need a place to host an email address “joe@icjoe.com” so I also got Zoho and set up that mailbox including adding a DNS entry at Cloudflare, after two days of mailing it it bounces back saying "DNS Error: DNS type ‘mx’ lookup of (the site, removed so it would post) responded with code NOERROR DNS type ‘mx’ lookup of (the site, removed so it would post) had no relevant answers. DNS type ‘aaaa’ lookup of (the site, removed so it would post) responded with code NOERROR DNS type ‘aaaa’ lookup of icjoe.com had no relevant answers. DNS type ‘a’ lookup of (the site, removed so it would post) responded with code NOERROR DNS type ‘a’ lookup of (the site, removed so it would post) had no relevant answers. "
It seems I need to add another DNS entry? I’m not sure, thank you
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Looks like you’ve got some missing DNS records. Are you hosted with Ghost Pro, or self-hosted?
You don’t have an MX record for icjoe.com - that tells the world where to deliver mail addressed to @icjoe.com. (Sounds like you chose Zoho, so you need whatever MX record they tell you you need.)
You also should have SPF records reflecting any mailserver that is going to send outbound email for you. That’s going to be mailgun AND whatever you’ve set up for transactional email, and it sounds like Zapier also.
That’s the email piece.
Now the hosting piece (I’m assuming you’re on Ghost Pro) - you’re missing your CNAME record for the root domain (if you’re setting it up that way), that should be pointing to your Ghost site’s whatever.ghost.io address. If you have Cloudflare proxying on, turn it off temporarily. Then go to /ghost , click the Ghost Pro link, and click custom domain. Fill in your info and click validate. Note that if you’ve got incorrect records cached somewhere it can take a couple hours before it’ll validate.
Hope that helps!
Thank you Cathy!
Yes I am using Ghost Pro. I put one TXT record from Zoho on Cloudflare two days ago.
I don’t have any SPF records – that must be it. But I did not see anywhere on Zoho to get that data.
I also wish to manage Ghost post emails if you can help – they are going to spam, while the same posts from Substack do not. I guess I need to manage MailerLite with DNS records too?
Thank you!
Joe
Hold on, back up. Your email is bouncing because you have no mx record. That’s problem #1. The TXT record alone won’t get your email to the right place.
You don’t need MailerLite. Or anyway, I don’t see anything in your message above about why you would need it?
Email deliverability is hard, especially if this is a newly registered domain. Good suggestions here: Email deliverability explained for publishers
Thank you Cathy!
I think Ghost uses MailerLite for its posts? ChatGPT may have wasted weeks of my life. That was the spam question.
OK so the TXT record alone won’t do it. I will check out the linked report – thanks so much!!
Ghost does not use MailerLite. Your Ghost Pro subscription includes being all set up for outbound email, which goes out with MailGun, but you don’t have to do anything for that to happen.
ChatGPT can be trouble. It knows nothing from the past two years (which is a long time in software development), but it’ll tell you something authoritatively that’s just plain wrong and waste hours of your time. It’s also amazing. Which one can be hard to tell.
The link I gave you isn’t going to fix your MX record. That’s about outbound email. For receiving email sent to someone@icjoe.com, you are going to need to set up the MX record following the Zoho documentation, here: Configure Email Delivery - Zoho Mail Setup
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Again thank you so much Cathy!! I really appreciate!!