Some of our customers use the company “Squarespace” to host their website, but use our email service. This will work as long as you set it up a certain way at Squarespace.

The first thing to keep in mind is that Squarespace offers two different ways to connect your domain name to the website you created at Squarespace: a common method using a CNAME DNS record that looks like ext-cust.squarespace.com (Squarespace calls this “DNS connect”), and a less common method using the Squarespace DNS nameservers that look like ns01.squarespacedns.com and so on (Squarespace calls this “nameserver connect”). This Squarespace page has more about the difference.

Most customers use the “DNS connect” method, and if you do that, any email service you have with us will continue to work; you don’t need to do anything special at Squarespace and you can ignore the rest of this page.

If you’re using the “nameserver connect” method, though, you should follow the steps below to ensure your email works properly. If you don’t do this, your mail might seem to mostly work, but you’ll have trouble sending to destinations like Gmail that do strong spam filtering. (One of the symptoms of this is that messages sent to Gmail bounce with the error “to best protect our users from spam, the message has been blocked. Please visit https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for more information”.)

On this page:

• Asking Squarespace for help
• What about Mailman lists?

Asking Squarespace for help

A simple way to handle this is to ask Squarespace to do it. You should be able to contact Squarespace and tell them:

I need to update the DNS settings for example.com to include
these six DNS records:

example.com MX 10 mx.tigertech.net

example.com TXT "v=spf1 include:customers.tigertech.net ?all"

1.tigertech._domainkey.example.com CNAME 1.tigertech.domainkey.tigertech.net

2.tigertech._domainkey.example.com CNAME 2.tigertech.domainkey.tigertech.net

autoconfig.example.com CNAME example.com.customers.tigertech.net

lists.example.com CNAME lists.example.com.customers.tigertech.net

If you’re familiar with DNS and you’d rather do this yourself in the Squarespace control panel, they have a page explaining how to enter DNS records that explains how to do it. You’ll want to add:

• A top-level MX record of priority 10 that points to mx.tigertech.net
• A top-level TXT record with the value v=spf1 include:customers.tigertech.net ?all
• A CNAME record for 1.tigertech._domainkey.example.com that points to 1.tigertech.domainkey.tigertech.net
• A CNAME record for 2.tigertech._domainkey.example.com that points to 2.tigertech.domainkey.tigertech.net
• A CNAME record for autoconfig.example.com that points to example.com.customers.tigertech.net

What about Mailman lists?

If you’ll be using Mailman mailing lists with us, you should also add an extra CNAME record pointing host name lists.example.com to lists.example.com.customers.tigertech.net.