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I'm a business management student doing an internship at a small company. They publish an e-mail newsletter through a digital marketing website every month, and I was going to publish it yesterday. Everything seemed to be fine until I hit "Send" and it asked me to authenticate the domain, with spf and DKIM values. At that time I had absolutely no idea what "domain" even meant, but I ended up having to learn how to do those changes and get the job done.

I figured out how to access the DNS management page, found our address on the list, and clicked something that translates to "Add Zone" (there was no zone previously). It asked me for "Name of the zone", where I wrote the web address, and "IP", it said that if I didn't know the value I could use 1.2.3.4 for now, so that's what I did.

I didn't make any change or alter any values except for adding two TXT entries (there were none), one for the spf and another one for the DKIM, with the values the marketing website told me to insert. I wasn't sure I had done everything correctly so I sent them a print-screen and they told everything about those 2 entries was fine and I just had to wait.

This was more than 24hours ago and I'm starting to get nervous. I read that it could take up to 48hours, but I also read that the TTL value is the number of seconds it takes to update, and that is set to 4hours for each of those records. Why hasn't anything changed yet? I checked with https://www.whatsmydns.net/ and it doesn't show the new values.

I know this is probably a very simple problem, but I didn't know where else to ask, and if I haven't solved this problem by Monday they'll kill me, because this is the first time they've had a problem with sending the newsletter and it looks like it's my fault because it happened right when I took over the task of publishing it.

I don't mind waiting the 48hours (which will have passed in about 15 more hours), but is there any way to be sure that at the end the values will have changed? Could there be some problem that will prevent those values from updating?

I'm not sure what information I can provide since I have no idea which info can be a privacy risk for the company if made public, but I'll try my best to help you help me :)

Very much appreciate any help!

TheMöet
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    Difficult to say without knowing more about the configuration, but I don't think you should have added a new zone, and particularly not with a made-up IP number. But why on Earth did your company ask an intern with no technical experience to carry out such a highly technical task? Isn't there anybody in charge of the IT systems? – Harry Johnston Jul 22 '18 at 01:06
  • From your description, there's a very good chances your DNS is managed elsewhere (or under a different account) and the random zone you created isn't actually doing anything at all. – ceejayoz Jul 22 '18 at 01:07
  • I thought I had to create a new one because there was none. The description read "Zones: 0/1" before I created this one. There is a person that helps with some IT problems, but I couldn't get him to help me. He just told me to check with the marketing platform to see if the values were correct. – TheMöet Jul 22 '18 at 01:14
  • Your question will undoubtedly get closed for being off topic. You'll probably need some help troubleshooting this. My contact info is in my profile. – Wesley Jul 22 '18 at 03:38
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    *”I figured out how to access the DNS management page, found our address on the list, and clicked something that translates to "Add Zone" (there was no zone previously).”* - if there was no zone previously, but the domain name was working, then whatever management page you found is *probably* not the one where your DNS is actually managed from. Also note that frequently internet facing dns will be managed differently compared to the internal DNS used on a corporate intranet. – HBruijn Jul 22 '18 at 06:18
  • Your question would have been so much shorter and clearer by just giving the name. You would also got faster and better answers. That would also have helped instead of useless and blatant wrong obfuscation, such as using `1.2.3.4`... – Patrick Mevzek Jul 23 '18 at 04:57

1 Answers1

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Fill in the following blanks before proceeding:

  • My domain's registrar is: _______
  • My domain's NS records point to: _______
  • I logged in to the following website to change DNS information: _______

Why is that important? Let's find out!

I figured out how to access the DNS management page...

Or did you? It would be helpful if you could share your domain in your question, but you're not obligated to.

found our address on the list, and clicked something that translates to "Add Zone" (there was no zone previously).

If there was no zone, but you've successfully sent email and operated a website from the same domain in the past, then you didn't do anything at the service that actually hosts your DNS records.

It asked me for "Name of the zone", where I wrote the web address, and "IP", it said that if I didn't know the value I could use 1.2.3.4 for now, so that's what I did.

Not only did you probably not change anything at the actual service that hosts your DNS records, you also made a change that's guaranteed to not work anyway. =)

I didn't make any change or alter any values except for adding two TXT entries (there were none), one for the spf and another one for the DKIM, with the values the marketing website told me to insert. I wasn't sure I had done everything correctly so I sent them a print-screen and they told everything about those 2 entries was fine and I just had to wait.

I'm sure they told you that, and I'm also sure they're completely clueless. Ignore them for now. And probably for ever. Let's move on...

This was more than 24hours ago and I'm starting to get nervous. I read that it could take up to 48hours, but I also read that the TTL value is the number of seconds it takes to update, and that is set to 4hours for each of those records. Why hasn't anything changed yet? I checked with https://www.whatsmydns.net/ and it doesn't show the new values.

The new values aren't changing because you probably didn't update the service that's hosting your DNS zone. If you're on a mac, crack open a terminal and run: dig ns yourcompanydomain.com and let us know what comes back.

I know this is probably a very simple problem, but I didn't know where else to ask, and if I haven't solved this problem by Monday they'll kill me, because this is the first time they've had a problem with sending the newsletter and it looks like it's my fault because it happened right when I took over the task of publishing it.

It sounds like none of this was set up right, and you just happened to come along at the wrong time.

I don't mind waiting the 48hours (which will have passed in about 15 more hours), but is there any way to be sure that at the end the values will have changed? Could there be some problem that will prevent those values from updating?

The generic line "DNS can take up to 48 hours to propagate" is a CYA phrase that takes into account bad DNS admins and software that can cache records longer than TTLs tell them to. Generally, TTLs are low, and changes to DNS should never take longer than TTL values. If things didn't change by now, they're not going to after 48 hours either.

Find your registrar, find the NS records to determine where your zone is hosted, log in, and change records. You don't need to make a zone, otherwise your website and mail would never have worked in the first place.

Wesley
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