Hi. I’m new here. (That’s not my name; that’s my status.)
Really new. To here and to everywhere. I was born yesterday.
No, in all seriousness, this stuff is all new to me. When it comes to DNS talk, etc., consider me a newborn baby. (So maybe I was born yesterday after all??)
I’m setting up my first domain, and I think I have successfully completed Step 0 (adding records to my domain). But how do I make sure this is the case for sure before deleting DNS records at my current domain registrar or before transferring the domain from current registrar to another registrar, as my domain name is being used for email as well and I don’t want to disrupt or interrupt the service?
I was told by the lovely Peter to query deSEC’s nameservers. But that left me with a few more questions than I had planned on asking, and we both agreed that I should share them on the forum for others to possibly benefit from (can’t spell forum without from).
Please see attached screenshots of Peter and my short conversation (Peter is blue, I’m red).
To be clear, I believe I’m up to Step 1 now: ‘Delegate your domain’ (according to the ‘Setup Instructions’), but I still don’t know if I’m ready to transfer my domain name over to my new domain registrar yet or not, change the nameservers to deSEC’s nameservers yet or not (Step 1), or at least don’t know how to find all this out. This is all important because I don’t want any downtime to my email service. Cheers for any help
For mail service, you’d be primarily interested in MX records for the domains and subdomains that you want to use in email addresses. Additionally you should configure SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) correctly. These are usually TXT records on the domain (for SPF, could also use SPF record type) and TXT records on subdomains of the _domainkey subdomain (for DKIM). Which subdomains exactly depends on the mail server configuration, because you can use different mail servers with different keys. The sub-subdomain names allow the mail servers to point out their own respective keys. Your mail host may offer domains that you can point at via CNAME for DKIM.
Copy over all your records, then delegate the domain to Desec. Changing the registrar is just a matter of having the new registrar delegate the domain to Desec. Some registrars/DNS-hosters allow you to provide name server delegation information from the start, others set up the domain with default records that you can only change afterwards. As Peter already mentioned, you can configure everything at Desec before you switch to the Desec nameservers, so the downtime should be minimal
