Skip to content

Your own domains

My domain will not verify

The five things that are actually wrong, in the order they usually are.

1. It has not propagated

DNS changes are not instant. An hour is normal, and some providers are slower. Nothing here is broken in the first hour.

2. The record landed on a subdomain

Most control panels append your domain to whatever you type in the name field. Typing example.com there produces example.com.example.com, which exists and answers nothing.

For a record on the domain itself, the name field usually wants @ or to be left empty.

3. A trailing dot

Some providers require the trailing dot on a target, some add it for you, and some treat a doubled one as a different name. If the value ends in a hostname, check whether your provider shows it with a dot and whether yours matches.

4. Wrong record type

DKIM is a CNAME here, not a TXT. A TXT record containing a hostname looks right at a glance and verifies nothing.

5. A line break in the value

Pasting a long value out of a browser sometimes carries a newline. Some panels accept it and store two records, neither of which is the one you wanted.

Checking what the world sees

Your control panel shows what you typed. This shows what the internet resolves:

dig MX example.com +short
dig TXT example.com +short
dig CNAME skudo._domainkey.example.com +short

If those look right and verification still fails after an hour, write to us with the domain name and we will tell you what our resolver sees, which is the only view that matters for this.

Written for people using Skudo. If a page here is wrong or missing, tell us.